


Fathers And Phantoms

by Omorka



Category: Real Ghostbusters
Genre: Drugs, Father-Son Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:29:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlie Venkman hires his son's business to clean up a recent acquisition of his.  As always when Charlie's involved, things go downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fathers And Phantoms

**Author's Note:**

> Started as a flashfic idea - a scene of Egon losing his shit at Charlie - and then kept growing. Spoilers through "Cold Cash and Hot Water," although they're pretty mild as spoilers go. Contains scenes involving drug use (not by the main characters) and some harsh language.

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't throw you out on the street right now," demanded Janine in the flattest voice she could muster.

The man in the ridiculous plaid sports jacket flashed his barracuda grin at her. "Now, is that any way to address your elders, young lady? I'm here to see my boy. Is he back there?" He stood on his toes, trying to peer over the filing cabinets that separated the reception area from Peter's office.

A sigh came from the landing on the basement stairs. "No, Dad, I'm down here. Hold on a moment; Ray's fixing a seal on the containment unit and we all need to be ready in case something tries to escape. I'll be up there as soon as we're done. Janine," Peter continued, "don't let him touch anything. Sic Slimer on him if he tries."

"I'm not going to break any of your fancy equipment, really," grumbled Charlie Venkman as he eased himself into the extra chair next to Peter's desk. Janine stood up from her own desk and followed him around, arms crossed across her chest, glaring at him. "Don't worry, Dr. V.," she called back, "I'm not letting him out of my sight."

"Good girl." The basement door closed with a click, and a deep rumbling noise came from the containment system below them. Charlie glanced at the stairs headed downwards, a faint look of worry quirking up the corner of his mouth. Janine continued staring at him, lips pressed tight with disapproval.

The rumbling noise accelerated, then stopped. There was silence for a few seconds, then the unmistakable noise of proton streams being fired, along with several yells of "Look out!" and "It's headed your way!" and "Shorten your stream!" The last two hollers - Ray and Peter in rapid succession, it sounded like - were "We got it!" and "Trap out!," followed by the backwards hiss of an activated ghost trap. The voices dropped to an unintelligible mumble, and then there was the crunch and gurgle of the containment unit cycling, followed by a hum from the containment grid, much lower than the rumbling noise, which then faded to inaudibility.

The four Ghostbusters poured out of the basement door and came up the stairs, looking tired but in good spirits. "Wow, Janine, that was great!" enthused Ray as he made it to the first floor. "When I removed the old seal, it didn't just peel away; it crumbled in my hand, and we had one escape - a whole ghost, not just a little piece of one like the last time. Just a Class Three, though. The guys drew it away before it could interfere with replacing the seal, and we caught it and put it back. Isn't that exciting? Oh, hello, Mr. Venkman." Ray finally caught sight of the older man at Peter's desk, but his smile never flickered; of all the Ghostbusters, he was the one most likely to give Peter's father a genuinely warm welcome.

Peter was decidedly less sanguine. He shucked his proton pack by the lockers and circled back to his office warily. Perching on the edge of his desk, he eyed his father as he might a feral dog. "Okay, Dad. What is it this time? And before you start, remember that we are not helping you with any more crazy schemes. We are not going anywhere or doing anything out of our way. The last time you came around - "

Charlie interrupted, "No, no, nothing like that. This is completely legit, son."

"I seem to recall that you said those exact words the last time you graced us with your presence," observed Egon. "And unless I am misremembering, the outcome of that visit was that you and Ray were trapped in the Mexican jungle for over 24 hours, we had to flee a giant coatl, and you failed to turn any sort of a profit from the venture."

Charlie waved a hand as if he were dismissing a pupil who vexed him. "Nothing like that, Egon. This isn't anywhere near that complicated, anyway. Some friends of mine are getting rid of some property, two townhouses that they don't need anymore, and they owed me some money from, uh, from an old debt." Peter scowled and opened his mouth to interrupt; Charlie rushed on ahead. "Anyway, they've traded them to me in exchange for forgiving the debt - don't look at me like that, Petey, I have the documentation right here, it's legal - and I just need to fix them up a bit. But, I have a problem - the fellows I hired to repaint and fix some of the woodwork won't finish the job. Say there's some spook moving their tools, blowing cold air down their backs, making them feel like they're being watched. I just came to hire you boys, like any other paying customer." He grinned, spreading his hands in a gesture that was obviously meant to be placating.

" 'Old friends,' Dad? What kind of a debt were they paying off?" Peter's voice dripped with suspicion. Somehow, it didn't seem like the idea of his father paying them for anything was very convincing.

"I don't see why -" started the older man, but he met his son's gaze and relented. "Okay, okay, it's an old gambling debt. I beat the pants off of them in a poker game that maybe wasn't completely above-board. But I wasn't cheating," he continued as both Peter's and Egon's eyes narrowed, "and the real estate transaction is perfectly legal. I have the deeds to both townhouses right here." He produced a folded stack of papers from his inside jacket pocket and waved them around; Peter snatched them away and began scanning them. "I just need you guys to come down, do that thing you do, and catch the spook that's scaring off my contractors. I'll pay you whatever the usual fee is, although of course," he leaned in towards Peter and gave his oiliest grin, "I'd imagine you have a discount for family members, hmm?"

Peter favored him with a shocked expression. "A _discount_? Are you kidding? Why, I'd be dishonoring the man who taught me to drive a bargain if I started giving discounts around here!" The wide-eyed look shifted to a crafty one, and he returned his father's smile with a shark-grin of his own.

Charlie looked surprised for a moment, then let off a bark of laughter. "Well played, kid. I did teach you everything you know, didn't I? I'm just too good, I can see that. All right. When tomorrow can you come out?"

"Your first open appointment for tomorrow," sang out Janine as her fingernails clicked on her keyboard, "is at 1 pm. You're actually free all afternoon; you have a 8 am and an 11 am, but the 11 am one is a follow-up and shouldn't take long."

"Who scheduled us for an 8 am bust?" groaned Peter, dropping his head into his hands.

"That was me," admitted Ray. "Sorry about that, Peter. The ghost only appears between sunrise and noon; I figured that 8 am gave us enough time without us having to be there at the crack of dawn."

"Tell you what," Charlie said, "Why don't we make it 4 pm? That's late enough that even if your morning appointments run over, you'll still get there in time, and the work crew won't knock off for the day until 5, so I can wring most of a day's work out of them but they'll still be there to see you guys take out the ghost. Sound good?"

It obviously sounded less than reasonable to Egon, who favored Charlie with a skeptical look, but Peter didn't seem to find anything wrong with it. "Sure. Give Janine the address, and we'll be there at 4. But Dad, no funny business, I mean it. If we get there and there's something you haven't told us, we are turning around and heading right back here."

"Cross my heart and hope to die, son." Charlie tried to look sincere, and instead managed to look like he had a stomachache.

After Janine had taken down the necessary information and Charlie had wandered back out the door, Peter favored the rest of the group with a disgusted expression. "All right, show of hands. Who has a bad feeling about this?" Every hand, even Ray's, went up. "Yeah. That's what I thought. If he really just needed to hire us, why didn't he do it over the phone? And why schedule a day in advance instead of asking us to do it right now?"

Egon shook his head. "Or at least have us come as early in the day as possible, to minimize the disruption to the restoration process."

"Do you really expect him to make sense?" asked Winston. "I mean, come on, guys, he doesn't think things through; he just goes by his gut and then plays the hand he's dealt."

"It's a miracle he's not in jail more often," muttered Peter. "All right, guys, when we go out there, I need everyone on high alert. Either we're some part of his current scam, or we're going to need the high firepower, I just know it."

"Given his past track record," Egon pointed out, "possibly both."

"That's what I'm really worried about," Peter replied, looking down at his desk.

\---

The day had, so far, lived up to expectations. The morning bust was, if anything, simpler than they had expected; the spirit was only a Class Three, a mother who had died by falling down the stairs as she tried to get her children off to school. A few minutes' work with a phone book had turned up her widower's current number, and as soon as the spirit had heard her son and daughter alive and well on the phone, she had said her tearful good-byes and moved on peacefully. Peter had felt so pleased with the whole thing, he didn't even try to sneak a containment fee onto the current house owner's bill.

The mid-day follow-up was a matter of Egon and Ray walking the perimeter of a vacant lot with the PKE meters. The residual readings of the dimensional rift that had opened here had fallen to near-undetectability, and the physicist and the engineer agreed that the rift was well and truly closed. There was no sign of the derelict office building that had been there when they first arrived several weeks ago - most of it had been sucked into the rift, and it looked like the owners had had the remaining partial wall demolished. Ray opined, not that it really mattered at this point, that the remains of the building had probably collapsed after falling through the rift, since the foundation hadn't come with it. Peter had handed that invoice to Janine as they piled out of Ecto, back at the firehouse in time for a late lunch.

"No one met us there. They must not love us, even though we did save them the cost of tearing the old wreck down. I think you'll have to mail it." Peter stretched like a cat; he'd been sitting in Ecto brooding about their later appointment while the two scientists finished up their scan, and his lower back wasn't happy about the bench seating. "So, any more calls?"

"No new jobs, if that's what you mean, Dr. V." Janine snapped her gum at her employer. "We got a message from a Dr. Toussaint down at Tulane; he's putting together a conference on ectoplasmic breakthroughs and he wanted Ray to call him back." Ray hung up his jumpsuit, closed the locker with rather more force than he probably intended, and practically skipped over to Janine's desk to claim the message slip from her. "Wow! I hope he wants us to speak at the conference, but even if he's just inviting us as participants, this is an awesome opportunity!"

"Just as long as he's not looking to us for funding, Ray." Peter ran a hand through his hair, and then glanced at his hand as if to verify that he hadn't been slimed on either job. "I'd love to do a presentation, though, if that's what he's looking for. Free publicity," he added as an aside to Janine, who muttered "Thanks, Captain Obvious."

"We'll give him a call and find out precisely what he would like from us," Egon said as he followed Ray up the stairs. Peter turned to Winston. "So I guess one of us should get started on lunch?"

Winston looked thoughtful. "We've got the fixings for sandwiches if Slimer hasn't eaten all the cold cuts."

"Sounds great. Let's go check. Then I want to do an equipment check before we head out again."

Winston favored him with an exaggerated look of shock. "Did I just hear Dr. Venkman volunteering to do work?"

Peter shrugged. "I just want to make sure we're prepared. My dad's involved, which means we have absolutely no idea what we're dealing with."

\---

"Where exactly is this place again?" Peter grated out from the back seat of Ecto. So far they'd crossed two bridges and turned down a ridiculous number of streets, and the neighborhood they were currently passing through was run-down and grungy. The smell of stale water came from somewhere east of them, but how far away it was, he couldn't tell.

"Just a couple more blocks, Peter. I can see why your Dad would need to fix a place out here up before he sold it," Ray commented. "Some of these places look like they're about to fall over. Uh-oh."

"Uh-oh?" chorused Peter and Egon together. Egon snapped his PKE meter out of his pocket and activated it; Peter leaned forwards and looked past Ray and Winston to the street ahead of them. A small crowd had gathered in front of what looked like one tall, dilapidated house with a tiny front yard full of boards and nails. As Ecto pulled up, they could see that the building had been divided in half into two narrow townhouse apartments; there was a door at each end of the rickety front walkway, and the peeling paint on the two sides had been different colors before it had succumbed to grime and mildew. A ragged cheer greeted them as they opened the doors, and Charlie Venkman stepped out of the crowd in a teal-and-orchid plaid jacket.

"Never fear, my friends and neighbors, my boy and his team are here!" he shouted, clapping Peter hard on the back and almost knocking him over. "They'll take care of the problem in a jiffy, and then this'll be the safest place in the neighborhood! Glad you could make it," he added, dropping his voice and turning towards the Ghostbusters conspiratorially. "Get your gear on, and I'll take you inside. We're going in the left half."

"Why don't you explain to us what's happened so far today," suggested Egon; his voice was mild, but there was a hardness in his eyes. He was obviously already suspicious.

"Let's get inside first. No need to scare these good people any more than they already are, right?" Charlie grabbed Egon and Ray by the elbows and practically dragged them up to the door; Peter and Winston followed, throwers out and powered up.

Charlie pulled a key from his pocket, unlocked the door, and prodded Egon in first; the scientist pulled away from the con man and began walking the perimeter of the room, meter out and chirruping softly, a scowl at his lips. Ray bounced in after him and began waving his own meter around. Peter and Winston followed Charlie in; the elder Venkman turned and locked the door behind them, dropping the key back in his front jacket pocket. He grinned broadly and announced, "All right, boys, just go ahead and do your thing."

"C'mon, Pop, you need to tell us what's been happening here today," ordered Peter. Something about the way his father was grinning made his stomach drop.

"Nothing, my boy, absolutely nothing!" Charlie's predatory smile could have scared a grizzly. "This place isn't haunted at all. I planted a rumor with the work crew, and they spread it around the neighborhood. Scared off the guys who hang around at night and steal lumber and stuff. Now, I figured I'd bring you guys in to do your little light show, we leave and say you caught the ghost, I get lots of word-of-mouth around here and maybe a reporter if it's a slow day, the property value goes up because it's got a good story, I pay you for your time, we all win." He gestured at the windows. "Just fire a couple of those things where they can see them out the windows. You don't have to take long."

Peter's face was rapidly reddening. "Dad, we are not firing the packs if we don't have anything to blast with them. These aren't toys, and they're sure not publicity gimmicks for your crooked real estate deal." To underline his point, he shut off his thrower and holstered it. "Did you really bring us all the way out here for what you knew was a crank call?"

"Not a crank call, son; a favor to your old man," pleaded Charlie. "All you have to do is fake a little struggle. Just a couple of blasts and then a trap; you don't need to make it look hard, they just need to see that you did something."

"We will do no such thing," rumbled Egon, taking his eyes off of the PKE meter to glare at Charlie. "I, for one, refuse to have any part in your shenanigans."

Peter glanced at Ray in amusement and mouthed 'shenanigans' before wheeling back on his father. "You've come up with some stupid cons before, Dad, but this is one of the lamest. I'm embarrassed that you managed to wrangle me into the middle of it. You can't flip a goddamned piece of property without dragging other people into your lies about it?"

Charlie seemed more upset that Peter was insulting his patter than that his son was angry at him. "I just needed something to make these two rat-traps worth fixing up. A little free publicity and something to keep the riffraff out never hurt anyone. There's nothing to be upset about. There's no ghost here to hurt anyone for real."

"Can't tell the truth for lying, can you, Mister Venkman?" said Ray, with a hint of betrayal in his voice. He glanced over at Egon; they locked eyes and nodded, a rather grim look on both faces.

"Oh, no. Don't tell me what I think you're telling me," groaned Peter, heading towards Ray.

"Yup." Ray held his meter up so Peter could see the screen; it made a faint chirping sound, the same one Egon's had made when he first entered the room. "I'm reading at least one spirit present in the building."

"Inactive, currently, which is why the meters aren't reacting very strongly," confirmed Egon. "I would theorize that it only manifests under certain very specific conditions, or possibly that it is localized to a single room of the building."

Peter leaned over; he wasn't the expert with these devices (he suspected Egon could pick up satellite signals with his, if he tried), but he knew how to read the screen. "Um, correct me if I'm wrong, here, guys, but that looks to me like there are at least _two_ ghosts around - a Class Three and, oh, crud, a Class Six?" He glared at his father, who gazed back in open disbelief.

"There are definitely both Class Six and Class Three energies present," confirmed Egon, fine-tuning a setting on his own meter. "However, they appear to be part of the same entity - look at the waveforms. They're perfectly synchronized."

"Okay, Class Fives are usually nether entities like Slimer, and Class Sevens are usually demons. We don't get Class Sixes that often. What should I be looking for?" Winston still had his thrower out, one finger ready on the power switch.

"Depends on its plane of origin," Ray explained, dropping easily into lecture mode. "Class Sixes from the Netherworld are usually major manifestations like ogres or night hags, although some of the beings listed in Tobin's as servitors or minor demons are Sixes rather than Sevens. Class Sixes with earthly origins are usually spirits of some natural phenomenon larger than a single individual but smaller than a full elemental, like a plant deva or the spirit of a lake. If a pack of wolves was killed all at once while defending their territory, if the individual wolves came back as ghosts they'd probably be Class Two or Three, but if the entire pack came back as a single manifestation, it'd be a Class Six. Hey," he exclaimed, snapping his fingers, "what if the Class Six is a composite entity? Maybe multiple Class Threes joined together, like the wolf spirits, and created a Class Six out of their combined PKE energies?"

"Or what if the Class Six absorbed the Class Three, like the Ringmaster ghost did to all those poltergeists and almost did to Slimer that one time?" offered Winston.

"Both of those scenarios are possible, given the information we currently have. We'll have to get a more complete set of readings from the ghost before we can determine if either one is correct," concluded Egon, starting to stride into the short hallway that was the room's only other exit.

Peter caught him by the elbow. "Whoa, hold on there, big guy. Class Sixes can be nasty. If we're going to split up, I want us in teams of two; no one wanders off by himself. Got it?"

Suddenly, Charlie's face split in a huge, oily smile. "Oh, I get it. You guys are trying to scare me, aren't you? Figured you could get a little extra pay if you played this up to me? Come on, son, you can't con me. I know there's nothing here; you boys can stop the big science project act, okay?" He elbowed Peter in the ribs. "I'm sorry I didn't let you in on the gag earlier, but I figured you guys wouldn't come out here at all if I told you before you got here. Let's just put on the light show and go home, huh?"

Peter stared hard at his father; Ray regarded him open-mouthed and goggle-eyed. Egon shot him a look as if he'd insulted his mother, his alma mater, and Isaac Newton all at once, and stalked into the next room, followed by Winston, who looked equally disgusted.

Peter had never quite figured out whether Charlie actually believed in his son's chosen profession. Half the time - when he'd tried to sell those ridiculous ghost repellers, for instance - he seemed to think the whole ghost deal was Peter's own personal long con, and his colleagues were either in on the gag or as snowed as the public was. The other half - like when he'd brought Hob Anagarak to New York - he acted like he believed, but saw the existence of spirits and demons as just another way to make a buck. And he wasn't even consistent; sometimes, he seemed to hold both ideas simultaneously. At the moment, he was behaving as if he thought it was all bunk, and Peter was starting to feel hurt and angry about it.

He was opening his mouth to protest when Ray beat him to it, his voice welling with hurt. "Mr. Venkman! Are you saying you don't _believe_ us? Look, you can see the readings for yourself!" Ray's eyes were wide, and he waved the PKE meter at Charlie as if he expected him to be able to read it. Was he _pouting_? Peter suddenly realized that Ray was laying it on a bit thick. He shot his friend a flicker of a grin, and got a tiny lift of an eyebrow in return. Good ol' Ray had a bit of the charlatan in him, after all, or at least a dramatic streak. Charlie just looked at the meter in bewilderment.

"Okay," Peter barked out, startling his dad, "Egon and Winston, head up to the third floor and work your way down. Ray and I will start here and work our way up. We'll rendezvous where the readings are strongest. Let's go, guys!" He whipped out his thrower and powered back up, falling into step behind Ray and watching the meter over his shorter partner's shoulder.

Sweeping the apartment didn't take very long; there were only two rooms on each floor, one small and the other smaller, plus a tiny kitchen and a tinier half-bath (more like a quarter-bath, Peter had complained) on the first floor. They gathered in the breakfast nook ("dining room," Charlie had corrected) at the back of the lowest level, on the other end of the stub of a hallway from where they'd started. Egon finally looked up from his PKE meter, caught his glasses as they slid down his nose, shoved them back into place with one finger, and stated "The readings are strongest right here, immediately next to the staircase. Mr. Venkman, is there a way into the space below the stairs from the other apartment?"

"Nope," shrugged the elder Venkman. "It's papered over on both sides. I figured the hot water heater was under there."

"If it is, then the plumber who installed it needs to have his certification revoked. That's a fire hazard, if it's a gas heater with a pilot light, and when it rusts out - not if, when - it'll make a hell of a mess and probably damage the stairs." Winston had taken the Ghostbusting job partially out of a desire not to go into his father's construction business, but he remembered enough about it to pick out what was and wasn't up to code. "And it's kind of unusual to seal off that space - in an apartment this tight, you want all the storage you can get." He exchanged a glance with Peter; the two of them stowed their throwers and began feeling along the triangle of wall space.

"Ray, what do you make of these readings? I have several theories, but I find myself unable to choose between them," Egon queried, watching the meter again.

"Well," started Ray, "I think the Class Three reading we've been picking up is a composite reading in its own right - the waveform is too complex to be a single entity." He traced something on the screen with his finger. "If I had to guess, I'd say that the Class Six absorbed two or three Class Threes, and forced their energy patterns into synchronization with its own somehow, like the Ringmaster did. But the whole entity is still inactive. To really see the differences between the waveforms, we'd need to get an activated reading. Egon, I'm going to reset my meter to focus on the Class Three readings; if this really is a composite spirit, we may have to be able to pull it apart to trap it."

"That seems like a reasonable precaution, Raymond." Peter smiled; Egon was the only person he knew who used Ray's full name, and he used it as a sign of approval more often than not. Ray flipped the meter over, pulled a screwdriver from his belt pouch, and removed the back panel. Just then, Winston tapped at the wall and stated "Got it."

Peter looked down. "Yup. Look at the floorboard there; there's a seam. Someone's patched this." He knelt down and measured a distance along the baseboard with his hands; he found a second seam, well-concealed by a thick coat of paint, about two feet away. "I bet there was a cupboard door here. Someone took it out and covered it over."

Winston pulled out a pocketknife and ran it just underneath the boards of the stairs. "Hey, wait, don't mess with that," protested Charlie as Peter and Winston started peeling the wallpaper away from that section of drywall.

"Oh, come on, Dad, don't give me that. Yellow, with pink cabbage roses? You'd have to strip it and replace it before you tried to sell this place, anyway. No one except someone's grandma could handle looking at that over their coffee and toast." Peter continued at his task, flakes of old wallpaper paste peppering the sleeves of his jumpsuit. "Besides, it's peeling around the windows, anyway."

They finished their impromptu stripping job just as Ray replaced the back cover of his meter and dropped the screwdriver in his pocket. A rectangular section of drywall about five feet high and two feet wide had clearly been patched into the rest of the wall; it was edged with rough spackle, and its color didn't match. "They didn't even bother to paint over it," grumbled Winston, who was clearly unimpressed with the workmanship.

The meter in Egon's hands began to breedle and whine, its antennae stirring. "We've found it, all right. It's not moving yet, but it's becoming active."

"Throwers out, guys!" Peter unslung his with the others, and the four packs warmed up in chorus. For a long moment, they stood still, arms readied.

Egon looked at the meter in his off hand. "It's stabilized again. It still hasn't become fully active, although I would theorize that it is probably aware of our presence." He glanced at the sealed portal in the wall. "I suspect that we're going to have to open its lair before we can extract it."

Charlie started forward in horror. "No, you can't damage this place, I already sunk more into it than it's worth - "

Peter waved him back. "It's not worth anything with a Class Six stuck in the cupboard. Winston, do we have the tools to open it, or should we just blast it?"

"There were saws and a crowbar in the front room. This doesn't look very sturdy; I think we can probably take out this panel without disturbing the rest of the wall." Winston squeezed past Ray and Charlie and headed down the very short hallway; he came back almost immediately with an alligator saw. "Jackpot. Everyone stand back, and I'll just cut the whole panel out."

Peter stood guard, thrower out and power on, while Winston punched through the sheetrock and began sawing through the bottom of the panel, half a foot above the floor. Egon leveled his PKE meter at the wall and watched the display as it blinked and warbled. Ray held his thrower in one hand and his meter in the other, glancing back and forth between the meter and the rapidly-lengthening cut in the wall. Charlie leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded, scowling.

The putty alongside one end of the panel cracked, and the panel bowed out with the next pass of the saw. Winston curled his fingers around the loose corner and muttered, "I should've brought the crowbar after all." Peter leaned down and caught the opposite side of the corner, and together the two most athletic Ghostbusters yanked the panel away from the wall. The rest of the spackle gave way, and the panel popped free, thumping Peter solidly in the shoulder.

"You okay?" asked Winston, shifting his grip.

"I'm fine, just was standing in the wrong place," Peter grinned, setting the patch of wallboard aside. Ray had already found a small flashlight in his belt pouch and directed it into the dark, dusty space behind the drywall, poking his head and one arm through the gaping rectangular hole.

Charlie made a retching noise and pinched his nose shut. "Ugh, guys, something smells like it died in there."

"Someone _did_," murmured Ray, aghast.

Peter pulled him away and held out one hand; mutely, Ray handed over the flashlight and stepped back, his face pale. Peter leaned in and directed the beam towards the center of the triangular space that spanned both apartments. The space had a floor and some shelves, but the interior walls were unfinished, and several more boards and a piece of plywood leaned against the exterior wall. Three corpses, little more than skeletons with a bit of dried flesh attached, lay propped against the outside wall and each other. One of them had fallen so Peter couldn't really see much, but the two the beam caught both had their feet bound and their wrists tied up behind them. It looked as if the ropes around their wrists were looped through a hole drilled in one of the wooden supports.

"Holy _shit_." Peter flicked the beam back and forth across the space, and saw several wooden crates, now empty, wedged where the stairs met the floor. A few plastic bags drifted near the corpses' feet; one, stirred by the new currents of air in the dead space, brushed past Peter's legs and out into the breakfast nook.

Peter pulled back out of the hole and wheeled on his father. "Dad, answer me _right now_ \- the guys you won this house from, what was their game?" The shock of seeing the dead bodies was rapidly being overcome by anger at Charlie for getting them into this. Winston took the flashlight from him and looked into the space himself, with Egon pressing in behind him; one of them murmured "Oh, god," just loud enough that the other's swearing was unintelligible.

"What's in there, Petey?" Charlie was going a shade of pale that bordered on green.

"Three tied-up corpses, Dad. Human ones. What were they doing in here?"

Charlie swallowed. "Smuggling. The place got too hot for them, they needed to get rid of it fast, so I swapped them for a couple of plane tickets out of town and them throwing a poker game for me so it looked legit. Cleaned up, too. But," he sped onward as Peter clenched a fist, "I didn't know there were bodies here! I didn't think they were those kinds of guys, honest!"

"What were they smuggling, Dad?" Peter's voice was hard and sharp as broken china.

"I don't know, I never asked! I figured it was better not to know."

"Gentlemen, I think we're about to have a problem," shouted Egon, as the PKE meter in his hands squealed, antennae fluttering.

The dust in the enclosed space beneath the stairs began to hover, then coalesce. An eerie light shone through the hole, first white, then an an unnatural blue, then a riot of clashing colors. With a cry like guitar feedback in an echo chamber, a shape burst out of the gaping rectangle.

It _had_ a defined shape. That was about all you could say about it. It wasn't symmetrical. Several dozen appendages radiated out from its center, giving it a diameter of about five feet, but they were fuzzy and jagged. Shifting geometric patterns of color rippled from the meeting point of its pseudopods outward. Nothing like a head or eyes could be seen. It was translucent and glowing, and it hurt to look at. Egon tried to shield his eyes with the PKE meter, still breedling.

"What in the hell is that?" gasped Charlie.

"It's the Class Six, but I've never seen one like that before," breathed Ray, eyes wide in wonder. He took a step towards it, holding up his meter as if it could ward it off.

"It's a floating bad trip," muttered Winston, flinching away.

"It's toast. Hit it!" shouted Peter, firing at what looked like its middle. It rotated in place, and suddenly it was much thinner where Peter was firing; the beam missed it and scorched the banister. The phantasm bobbed up and then wheeled forward, into the middle of the crowded room. The feedback noise faded, and it fell silent, drifting slightly.

"Hold your fire; if we miss it we'll hit each other, or worse, cross the streams," warned Egon, backing into the tiny kitchen to give the phantasm room to move away from the others. Winston, on the other side of the room, edged sideways into the stub of a hallway, keeping his thrower pointed at the spirit.

Ray tugged on Peter's sleeve and pointed up. Peter nodded, and the two of them vaulted over the railing onto the stairs, hoping to get a decent shot from above. Peter bounded up, two at a time, and was almost at the second level when the phantasm swooped up and blocked their way. He leveled his thrower and tried to back up a step, bumping into Ray, who hadn't seen him stop in time. A proton stream from Winston sizzled the air in front of him; again, the Class Six rolled and thinned itself out of the way.

"It's beautiful," whispered Ray from somewhere behind Peter's left shoulder. Peter glanced at him, concerned; Ray's eyes seemed strangely dilated. Peter looked back at the rippling day-glow rainbow blaze in front of them, and suddenly he wanted to touch it, reach out for it . . . .

"Peter, get back!" shouted Egon, jockeying for a clear shot. Charlie was suddenly in his way, trying to duck back into the kitchen, despite Egon and his pack taking up most of the tiny room. Ray and Peter jerked back to awareness, edging back to the landing where the staircase turned the corner; the phantasm pinwheeled over the railing into midair, its appendages whirling into a spiral, and Peter again felt the strange urge to stop firing at it and step towards it.

To fall into its embrace . . . .

"Peter, what's happening?" murmured Ray. He sounded out of it. Peter snuck a glance; Ray's pupils were completely blown. He wondered what his own looked like.

"I don't know. Try not to look directly at it," Peter ordered. "I think it's trying to influence us." His head was muzzy; he shook it to try and clear it, and was struck with a wave of dizziness. His free hand clutched at the banister to steady himself, and he felt Ray grip his shoulder.

Winston fired again, and this time the shot was good. The Class Six seemed to roll in place, then thinned in several directions at once and oozed free of the stream. Winston swore under his breath; Egon did the same, grabbing Charlie by the shoulders and pivoting on one heel to switch their positions.

Egon turned back to the fray just in time to see the phantasm draw itself into a ball and then _pulse_ sickeningly outward. A ripple spread out from it, flashing through the cramped space with a sound like a whip-crack mating with a church bell. Winston clapped his free hand to one ear; Charlie dove to the floor and covered his head.

Peter and Ray dropped where they stood like puppets with their strings cut. The ghost flashed through the railing and hovered above them, colors and light throbbing through it with dizzying speed.

"No!" shouted Egon, loudly enough to be heard over the ringing in Winston's ears. He raised his thrower and fired directly over the heads of his fallen comrades, striking the entity dead center. It throbbed and writhed, but before it could thin itself away again, Winston's stream caught it at an angle and forced it down the stairs towards Egon.

"I don't think the two of us can hold it for very long," called Winston, shortening his stream and pulling the phantasm over the railing and away from the landing.

Egon nodded curtly. "Bring it straight down," he responded, hooking the PKE meter onto his belt and exchanging it for a trap. He did a one-handed throw, but his aim was good enough; the trap landed just in front of where Winston had wrestled the Class Six. It rolled, flung a pseudopod behind itself, and started to ooze away from the two streams, but Egon stomped the trigger in time, and the wedge of brilliant light snapped open with the psychedelic entity caught in the center of its vortex. It dropped in with surprisingly little protest, and the trap clicked shut.

Egon charged up the stairs, stowing his thrower, his eyes hard. As he reached the landing, he went to one knee and found the pulse point in Peter's neck, then Ray's. He bowed his head for a moment; Winston looked like he might be sick. But then the taller man called down, "They're alive, both of them. Their pulses are weak and extremely erratic, and their breathing is shallow. They're both unconscious. I don't think they were injured when they fell; they seem to have just dropped onto the landing. But we should get them to a hospital immediately." He swallowed. "I'm worried that they might be about to go into cardiac arrest."

Winston joined him on the staircase and looked at Peter's sprawled limbs. "Do you think it's safe to move them?"

Egon swallowed again, harder, then nodded. "I saw no evidence of a blow to the head or a possible back injury. It will be faster for us to take them to a hospital than to summon an ambulance and wait for it to arrive."

Winston scooped Peter up in a fireman's carry and worked his way down the stairs. "Oh, no you don't," he snarled at Charlie, who was edging towards the hallway. "You get up there and help Egon with Ray."

"You need me to open the door for you," explained the elder Venkman, pulling the key from his pocket. He hustled to the door, unlocked it, and held it open for Winston and his burden. He was about to let himself out when Egon thrust the smoking ghost trap and Ray's PKE meter at him; the tallest Ghostbuster was struggling under the weight of the shortest one, but he'd evidently been unwilling to leave any of their equipment behind. Charlie followed them out to Ecto-1, glancing at the silent meter in his hands. "So, what happens now? Is that it, or are those others you talked about still there?"

"There was only one entity; it was a composite. Whether it comprised the three Class Threes from those captives, or merely absorbed them and took their energy, or was completely unrelated to them, I do not know and do not have time to speculate on." Egon laid Ray's limp form out in the back of Ecto, next to the pack rack; Winston arranged Peter's body on the back seat and buckled him in. They stowed their comrades' packs, and Winston removed his own. "We need to call the police immediately to investigate those bodies," continued Egon, "and we need to determine what the entity did to render Peter and Ray unconscious." He removed Ray's meter and the trap from Charlie's grip and hooked them to the equipment rack, then gestured impatiently at the older man. "Get in next to Peter and keep him steady on the way to the hospital."

"Nah, you guys go on ahead; I'll just take a cab back to my hotel and meet you at the hospital when things are settled." The older Venkman spread his hands and took a step back, away from Ecto and the two unmoving bodies sprawled in it.

Egon took one step forward, his longer legs easily cutting the distance between him and his friend's gene-donor in half. His face was a marble mask, but behind his round lenses a lightning storm crackled in his eyes. He was still wearing his proton pack; he unhooked the thrower, turned a knob, and brought it up in a single smooth motion, and the click-thrum-and-whine of the thrower powering up spoke more eloquently than any word could have.

"Egon, wait," began Winston, but the blue fire of the physicist's eyes never flickered.

"This proton pack is currently set for its lowest power. If I fire it at you, it will not cause any permanent damage. It will, however, paralyze you by overloading all of the surface nerves in your body. I have experienced the sensation myself; it is not dissimilar to the worst imaginable case of pins-and-needles," Egon began, then stopped, his lips working silently for one long second.

The marble mask suddenly shattered; Egon's brow furrowed, his eyes narrowed, and his mouth curled into a carnivorous snarl. The lightning behind his eyes rolled into thunder in his voice. "I have _had_ it with you, Charles Venkman! At this very moment, your son - blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh - is lying unconscious in the back seat of our vehicle, along with his friend and our colleague. They may well be dying. We need to get them to a hospital as soon as possible, and we need as much information on the nature of their injuries as we can possibly get in order to ensure their recovery. And _you_ -" he almost spit the word " - you are trying to weasel out of accompanying us and assisting in any possible way, because you are a scam artist and you are afraid you will be found out. The life of your own son, the only kin you have in this world, means infinitely less to you than your own skin." The scientist paused to take a breath; Charlie started to edge backwards again, opening his mouth to protest, and was stopped by the next outburst. "I will _not have it!_ Two of the five people I love in this world are potentially _dying_, and if you can do anything about it, you will, or so help me, I will turn the power on this thrower to high and send your component molecules to Canada and Cuba at the same time. Charles Venkman, get in the goddamn car, sit the fuck down, and shut the hell up."

The elder Venkman's jaw dropped open, but he made no attempt to move. Without hesitating, Egon's finger moved from the power switch to the thrower button. Charlie gulped, hopped into Ecto's back seat next to Peter's unmoving form, and fastened his seatbelt, mutely.

Egon unbuckled and removed the thrower as he powered it down, and secured it on the rack next to Ray. He and Winston jumped into the front seats, and Winston coaxed the engine into roaring life as Egon snapped on the wailing siren. The old ambulance peeled into traffic, doing its job from its previous life with gusto.

"Man, I've never heard you cuss like that before," murmured Winston, low enough that he hoped Peter's father couldn't hear him over the siren.

In the seat next to him, Egon was shaking, tiny tremors shooting through him hard enough to jitter his hair out of place. "I cannot remember ever having been this angry at anyone before. Walter Peck was not even the same order of magnitude. The threat to actually neutronize him was not an idle one. If either of them dies because of his mendaciousness, I still fully intend to carry it out. Winston, when we get to the hospital, I need you to scan me to make sure I am not being influenced by paranormal forces."

The older man shook his head. "No, my man, that's just good old-fashioned righteous anger. I'll still check if you want me to, but you've had reason to want to thrash that man before, and with him pretending that Peter and Ray being down like that was no big deal . . . if you hadn't threatened to blast him, I might have had to deck him one myself."

The rest of the trip was spent in silence, Egon gripping his PKE meter like a lifeline, knuckles white, and Winston's full attention focused on the road ahead of them. If Charlie had anything to say, he kept it to himself.

\---

Peter opened his eyes and saw only whiteness. He tried to focus on whatever was above him, but he couldn't even tell whether that was a ceiling or the sky, or how high above him it was. He tried to roll over onto his side, which more or less worked, but the view wasn't any different. He didn't seem to be dizzy or nauseous, but he felt disoriented.

Wait. He had been lying on his back. That meant his proton pack was gone. He reached up to his shoulders and didn't find the straps. His hands went to his belt, and found it missing - no traps, either. Oh, that was bad.

He pushed himself to a seated position. The view still didn't change. He could see no trace of a horizon, a wall, a ceiling, or even a floor.

"Guys?" he called into the blankness. There was no echo; his voice seemed to be swallowed up by the space.

Peter struggled to his feet. He could feel a surface beneath him, but he couldn't see it - his field of view looking straight down was the same blank whiteness that he saw looking in any direction. "Egon?" he yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth to try to amplify the sound. "Ray? Winston? Dad?"

For a second, he thought he heard a faint echo. Then it resolved into his name: "Peter? Peter!" He tried to turn towards it, but it appeared to be off to his left and below him.

"Guys? Are you here?" He tried walking forward; that seemed to work, although he couldn't tell if he was actually moving or not. "Guys!" He broke into a run, heading in what he thought was the direction of the voice.

"Peter!" It was clearer now; did that mean he was headed the right way? There was a shape, indistinct, colorless, in front of him and - below? "Peter, it's me, it's Ray!" The shape came closer, but it remained fuzzy. It didn't resolve into Ray's familiar shape until it was close enough to touch.

Well, almost. Ray came to a stop almost immediately beneath him, with about a foot and a half between the top of Ray's head and the soles of Peter's boots.

"Boy, am I glad to see you," smiled Ray.

"Glad to see you too, Tex. Um, how did you get down there?" Peter stepped back a few feet so he could see Ray again.

"I'm not sure. It might be because I was lower on the stairs than you were when the phantasm nabbed us, but I don't think I was this much lower. No, wait, weren't we both on the landing by that point?" Ray shook his head, as if to clear it. "It's all a little fuzzy. Here, give me a hand." Ray reached up; nothing blocked his hand as it passed through the plane that Peter had been thinking of as the floor.

"Uh . . . I hate to break it to you, Ray, but it's just as likely that I'll get pulled down to your level as that I can pull you up to mine. I'd rather not take that tumble if I can help it." Peter carefully knelt down on his 'floor,' leaning over to look at Ray.

"No, I think it'll be all right. I was able to change which direction I thought was up for a little while earlier, and it didn't hurt when I fell sideways. It was more like slipping than falling, anyway. Just grab my hand." Ray gave Peter a pleading look, and the psychologist relented; he took hold of Ray's hand, and the two of them slid towards each other until they were on the same level.

"I don't mind saying that this place is freaky weird. Where are we?" asked Peter.

Ray frowned. "I'm not sure. I don't have my meter with me, or any of my equipment. I don't even have the screwdriver I know I put in my pocket. It doesn't look like the Netherworld, which would be the first place I would imagine a ghost would take us." His brow furrowed. "And if it's not the Netherworld, I don't know what other alternative dimension of reality it might be. I hope it left readings strong enough for Egon to follow."

Peter looked around, ready to duck. "Is it here, too?"

Ray shook his head. "I don't think so, and I don't think it sent over anyone it wasn't touching. I wasn't positive that it had gotten you until I heard you, although I thought I could sense your presence. This place feels . . . empty, but not." He shivered. "Can you feel it, Peter? I think there's someone else here, but it's not the ghost, and I don't think it's anyone we know."

Peter started to deny it, but then he felt the skin prickle on the back of his neck. He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. Psi stuff fell under his field, and while actively trying to use it made him nervous, he at least knew how to be receptive. Quieting his mind, he tried to open his perceptions to whatever it was that Ray was sensing.

He _did_ feel something else out there in whatever this place was, and it sure didn't feel like Egon or Winston, but it didn't feel threatening, either. "Maybe you're right, Ray. Maybe it got one of the construction workers earlier, and Dad didn't tell us, or didn't know. We should probably try to find them." He glanced around. "Sure wish I had a thrower, though. For such a boring place, it's way too creepy."

\---

As soon as they got to the emergency room, Egon and Winston divided up their duties. Egon explained the situation to the orderly at the desk, and got Peter and Ray admitted. Then he had to repeat his explanation, in much greater detail, to the doctor on call, an older woman of South Asian descent. Meanwhile, Winston buttonholed Charlie, dragged him to the pay phone, and began making calls.

The first went to the firehouse, where Janine was not yet off for the day. He let her know that Peter and Ray were injured (and that Egon was not, although this gave her less than a second's relief); she immediately declared that she would be right there, and Winston could explain what had happened when she got there, and did she need to bring anything? He assured her that at the moment, they didn't know much more, and gave her the hospital's address. As soon as she'd hung up, he dialed the police, and explained the situation as much as he could.

"And here's the owner of the property," he said, the hand not holding the phone hooked in the back of Charlie's jacket. Charlie stared at the receiver like it was a scorpion, but Winston held it out at him and refused to let him go. Finally, the elder Venkman stopped struggling and took the phone. "Officer? Yes, I'm sorry, there's been some mistake . . . no, he's correct that it is technically my property, but I haven't . . . no, I've only had it for two weeks. My name? Uh . . ." Winston narrowed his eyes, and muttered "You know, I could let Egon go ahead and blast you," just softly enough that the other end of the line couldn't hear. Charlie went white as a sheet and continued, "Um, I'm Charlie Venkman. Yes, he's my kid. No, I just asked them to come out as a favor to his old man; they'd never seen the house before. Sure, the address is . . . "

Charlie stammered his way through the rest of the conversation. Winston collared him and dragged him back to the waiting area, where Egon had finally finished explaining the situation. He was seated with his back ramrod straight, eyes staring straight ahead, mouth a thin line. The marble mask had been firmly replaced.

"Hear anything yet?" Winston asked as casually as possible, indicating to Charlie that he should take a seat. The man in the loud plaid jacket dropped into one of the plastic bucket chairs, eyeing Egon with something approaching genuine fear. The physicist turned towards Winston slowly, then shook his head. "Not yet," he said, his voice only faintly wavering. Winston said nothing, settling into the chair next to him to wait - and to make sure the con man didn't bolt before the police showed up.

Janine arrived forty-five minutes later, but she beat both the doctors and the police. Her eyes widened and then narrowed again as she saw Charlie. "Didn't expect you to still be around," she snapped as she stalked across the waiting room towards them.

"It will be necessary to give a full recounting of the incident to the doctors, and then to the police," said Egon in a flat tone. "His presence is required for that."

"And the fact that his own son is in there has nothing to do with it?" Janine raised an eyebrow at Winston, who shook his head. "Nope, he tried to bolt," he answered. "At least until Egon threatened to neutronize his ass."

"He did what?" gulped Janine, staring at Egon in astonishment. The scientist's expression didn't change, but his face colored faintly, either with embarrassment or an echo of his previous anger.

"Yup. Cussed him out, too." Winston looked at Egon with what might have been amusement if he hadn't been so worried.

Egon snapped back to life. "That reminds me, I asked you to scan me to make sure I wasn't being influenced." He unclipped the PKE meter from his belt and pulled out the antenna to activate it. "Just a moment; I need to set it to save the recordings of the previous session." His fingers moved efficiently from switch to dial to switch again, and it made a brief whirring noise. He twiddled the dial a final time and handed the meter to Winston. "Just do a full PKE scan for right now. I'll reset it for my biorhythms in a moment."

Winston raised the meter to just above Egon's head, and slowly lowered it until it was pointed at his feet. "Nope. You're clean. You want to check me out, too?"

"It's probably not necessary. You weren't the one who was acting in an uncharacteristic manner." Egon paused. "Then again, there's no obvious reason not to take all possible precautions." He pointed the meter at Winston, then flicked it up and down. His eyes narrowed, and he turned to Charlie. The older man flinched slightly, but Egon just repeated the gesture at him. "No, neither of you shows any indication of psychokinetic or ectoplasmic residues." The scientist flipped the meter over and dug his pocketknife out, opening the screwdriver blade.

He was just finishing adjusting it for biorhythms when a gentleman in a white coat with thinning ginger hair emerged from a side door, searched the waiting area with his eyes, and made a beeline for them. "You must be the Ghostbusters. I'm Dr. Irwin. May I have a word with you?" He frowned a bit when Janine and Charlie also stood up, but he clearly chose not to argue about it. He took them down a long hallway with rather harsh lighting, talking in a low voice as they went.

"The good news is that your colleagues are stable. You made the correct decision in bringing them here immediately; their blood pressure was dangerously low, both of them, and their breathing irregular. They're both still breathing on their own, although we've got them both on oxygen and are closely monitoring them. We've administered medications that have stabilized their blood pressure. Their condition does not appear to be worsening, and they're out of immediate danger." They were in an elevator lobby; Dr. Irwin stepped into one that had just let off a very pregnant woman and waved everyone in.

"But they're not recovering, either?" asked Janine, after a pause to let Dr. Irwin punch the button for the third floor.

"That's the bad news. They have some minor bruises and contusions, probably from falling on the stairs. Other than that, there is nothing detectably wrong with them, but they remain unconscious and their breathing is still distressingly shallow." Dr. Irwin paused to let everyone out of the elevator, then turned down a side hallway past a nurses' station and into a smaller but more comfortable-looking waiting area. "They're not significantly injured, so I didn't see any need to place them in the intensive care unit. This unit is usually for our transitional patients. We were lucky enough to have two beds free in the same room; they're in 304 if you would like to see them." He ran his hands through his hair. "If it is possible, I would like to suggest that one of you stay here for the next few hours. If and when they do regain consciousness, they may be disoriented." He glanced at the four worried faces in front of them and hesitated. "Dr. Spengler, may I have a brief word with you privately?"

"Certainly," Egon responded calmly, but both his eyebrows were raised. Dr. Irwin drew him aside into the room where the two fallen Ghostbusters lay.

Egon started when he saw his friends hooked to the telemetry equipment. They'd been in hospitals before - busting ghosts was an inherently hazardous operation - but the two forms before him were distressingly inanimate. He could hardly tell they were breathing. Something seemed to be missing, although it was merely a gut feeling. The bodies lying limp on the beds were clearly not corpses; they were pale, but not waxy or bluish, and the beeping of the equipment between them clearly registered their pulses. But something _felt_ empty about the shapes of his friends.

Dr. Irwin looked at him with calm compassion. "It is somewhat startling. I might have expected this with much greater trauma, but . . . " He gestured as if to indicate their lack of injuries. "Tell me, Dr. Spengler, do either of your friends habitually use . . . recreational pharmaceuticals?"

"What?" responded Egon. His head snapped up, and his glasses promptly slid down his nose; he caught them with one finger and pushed them back into place. Dr. Irwin looked at him sharply, still needing an explicit response. Egon shook his head once, hard. "No. Peter . . . indulged, on rare occasions, back in our college days, but not since we began our studies into paranormal manifestations. He understood the necessity of keeping his perceptions clear. Ray used to have a fairly serious addiction to nicotine, but he's quit. If he ever tried anything illegal, it would have been before we met him. Currently, they both consume rather large doses of caffeine on a daily basis, and the occasional alcoholic beverage, but nothing stronger."

The doctor sighed. "I didn't think so, but I needed to ask. There was a small amount of white powder on the leg of Dr. Venkman's uniform; it tested positive for opiates. We initially thought their condition might potentially be due to overdose, but neither of them shows any trace of drugs, licit or illicit, in their bloodstream." He rubbed his forehead, just above his eyes. "Do you know where that might have come from?"

Egon's eyebrows lowered, and his eyes glittered darkly. "We were busting a ghost at a house whose previous owner may have used it for smuggling, according to the current owner. He didn't know what contraband was being transported, but there were several empty containers - crates and bags, mostly. We did not investigate those terribly closely, but either Peter or Ray might have brushed up against one."

Dr. Irwin nodded. "So they might have had some direct contact, but not with enough to have been the cause of their current state. Another dead end, but at least we can cross that off the list. Thank you, Dr. Spengler. I'll be back before the end of my shift to see if there's any change in their condition, and there is a nurse on duty at the station if something occurs before then."

Egon followed the doctor out of the room, thanking him, and stepped back into the waiting area. He turned towards Charlie, and instantly the room seemed darker, as if Egon had brought a stormcloud with him. "Mr. Venkman, I believe I know what your associates were smuggling," he thundered, standing so close to the older man he could have pushed him over by shifting his weight, towering over his friend's father and using every inch of his height to intimidate. "Would you care to speculate? Or did you know?"

Charlie put his hands up, but he didn't push the taller man away. He seemed to be afraid to touch him, as if the lightning in those blue eyes would strike him down if he laid a hand on the scientist. "I swear, Spengler, I never asked. I didn't _want_ to know. Safer that way. Plausible deniability, you know?"

"So what was it?" Winston interrupted, before either Egon or Charlie could do or say anything that would get them kicked out of the hospital.

"Drugs," said Janine with a shrug. Charlie flinched, and said something obscene-sounding under his breath. Winston looked at her, then at Egon, who rumbled "You are, of course, entirely correct, Janine. May I ask how you knew?" His baleful gaze remained firmly fixed on Charlie.

Janine looked up, her features carefully arranged to conceal the worry that flickered at her eyes and the anger that tugged the corners of her mouth. "First, there's not much else worth smuggling - maybe weapons, but that's all I can think of - that would make a property hot enough to need to drop that fast. Second, and probably related, it would have to be drugs for them to off three people and not even be able to dump the bodies, since what was already in their systems might be evidence. Third, Winston described the ghost as looking like a bad drug trip, and from everything I've seen around you guys, that's probably not a coincidence. Fourth, it was something serious enough to piss you off worse than you already were, and make you come out here to challenge Mr. V here instead of making him talk to the doctor, or telling us how Ray and Peter are doing."

Her voice rose towards the end of the last sentence, and Egon finally pulled his gaze away from Charlie. "Of course. I'm sorry. That was very selfish of me. They are . . . " His voice faltered, and for a second he looked like he might fall over; Janine clutched at his arm to steady him. The stormcloud behind his eyes burst into rain, and Egon dropped into a chair, gasping as if he'd been struck in the solar plexus. Tears streamed from his eyes, but he forced his voice to keep working instead of breaking into sobs. "They are . . . stable. I had . . . I had to look very closely . . . to see that they were . . . they were still breathing." His chest convulsed, and he made a strangled noise as if he were the one not getting enough air. He looked directly at Janine, sky blue eyes meeting aqua. "I realize that it is likely an illusion, that . . . I might believe this if they were merely unconscious due to . . . to concussion. But their bodies look . . . empty." He swallowed, adam's apple bobbing. "I am not one to rely on . . . intuitive reactions. But my intuition was screaming that they, that the essence that makes them Peter and Ray, was not . . . not present. I fear that they are gone, that all we have are their . . . are their shells." His eyes closed, and he tucked his head down with his chin to his chest before dissolving into one wracking sob. The tremors that had shaken him in Ecto returned, convulsing him as he struggled to contain his grief and rage.

Janine curled around him protectively, shielding him from the rest of the waiting room with her body. Winston moved to Egon's other side, dropping one hand on his shoulder and squeezing gently. He caught Janine's eye as Egon removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, tears rolling down his long face. "I'm going to go in and see how Pete and Ray are doing for myself. You take care of Egon, okay? You can take a turn after me, and then we'll see if he's ready." Winston glanced over to the far corner of the waiting room, where Charlie had bolted as soon as Egon had broken. The older man was curled up in a chair with too little padding, staring at a point on the ceiling, his expression alternating between fear, anger, and something that Winston couldn't quite identify but might have been pleading.

His hands were folded. For a fleeting instant, Winston wondered if the old man was praying.

\---

"Ray, even if there is someone else here, how are we going to find them?" complained Peter, chasing after his partner. "We don't know how big this place is. We don't have any way of marking where we've already been. We can't see more than about ten feet away. And apparently we can move up and down as easily as we can any other direction." He caught up to Ray, who had paused for him, and folded his arms. "It was blind luck that we found each other."

"I don't think that was luck at all. Like I said, I could kind of feel you, although I wasn't sure until you yelled. I had a very general idea of what direction to go, anyway." Ray looked around. "I'm pretty sure this other feeling isn't anyone we know. I don't think it got Egon or Winston, or your dad." The auburn-haired man looked back at Peter. "Can't you feel anything?"

Peter closed his eyes and tried to quiet the clamor in his head. There did still seem to be a sort of vague sense of another presence, not nearly as strong as the presence of a ghost, but very faintly discernible. "Maybe. I'm not sure." He opened his eyes and looked at Ray. "That way?" he asked, pointing at about a sixty degree angle off to the left and slightly upwards.

"Yeah, that's where I feel it coming from, too." Ray turned in that direction and started to head off again, then stopped and looked at the white blankness beneath his feet. Very carefully, he began walking again, looking for all the world like he was going up an invisible ramp. Peter followed, but discovered that he was still walking on what he felt as a level surface.

"How are you doing that?"

Ray turned around. "Just change your idea of where up is."

"What?" Peter looked at his friend blankly. Ray sighed and came back to him. "Close your eyes and take my hand, Peter." The dark-haired Ghostbuster blinked at his partner in confusion, but did as he asked. Ray's hand closed on his - a comforting sensation in this weird place - and began tugging him forward.

"You can open your eyes now, Peter." He did, and saw them walking on the level again. "I guess you can't watch the transition. Once I took you the right way, it worked just fine."

"You mean we're on a slope?" Peter looked around.

"No, we just changed what flat was." Ray let go of his hand, and kept walking, his features screwed up in concentration. As Peter gaped at him, he seemed to walk up a slope, then at right angles, then finally upside down. He stopped just above Peter, his feet just barely beginning to disappear into the white fog directly above Peter's head. "I don't think there's a real 'up' or 'down' here, or actual gravity. It seems to be completely based on your point of view."

Peter swallowed. "Ray, that brain of yours is something else, but I still don't know how you did that. That makes no sense at all."

Ray kept walking in the loop he'd started, until he returned to Peter's side. He was eye-to-eye with the taller man. They looked down, and Ray's feet were a few inches above Peter's 'floor.' The engineer sighed, put one foot forward, and stepped 'down' so that they were level with each other again. "I don't know how I'm doing it, either," he admitted. "I only know what I'm doing, and that it works. I just change how I'm looking at the situation, my image of myself, and I can change direction."

Peter shook his head. "This must be a modality thing."

"What do you mean, Peter?"

"You're a visual thinker. You can do that. I'm an auditory; I can't look at things in my head the way you can. I think if we need to do that again, you're still going to need to lead me."

Ray grinned. "Actually, as I recall, the last time you did modality testing on us, my results were a mess."

"Yeah, because you're also a synesthete. But you approach things from a visual perspective, we figured out."

"Egon said it was a spatial perspective, whichever sense it was. That I take in the whole picture. You and he are more linear. Oh, wait, spatial perception, that could be it - I can change my perspective of the space we're in all at once. For you, it would have to change gradually, linearly. I bet we could teach you to go 'uphill' or 'downhill,' if we had enough time."

"I don't want to be here that long. I bet the nightlife here is nonexistent." Peter cocked his head. "Wait, I think I hear someone."

Ray turned in the same direction. "Yeah, I think you're right. Come on!" He grabbed Peter's hand, and they were off again.

Much sooner than Peter had expected from the faintness of the sound, a shape swam out of the white blindness. The darker fuzz resolved into three shapes, and then they were almost on top of them. Peter and Ray stopped running as one of the three men before them, a thin Hispanic-looking man with very short hair, sat up from where he was lying. His eyes took a long minute to focus on them. The other two men remained where they were, supine; one of them, the source of the sound they'd heard, was murmuring, as if he were talking in his sleep.

"Hey, wake up," chided Peter. "I'm Dr. Peter Venkman, one of the Ghostbusters. Who are you?"

The stranger's eyes finally snapped into focus, but instead of answering Peter's question, he turned to the other two men - a tall, muscular African-American and an older-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair who might have been Italian - and shook them. "Wake up, guys, we're in even more trouble!"

\---

By the time Janine returned from the intermediate care room, her own eyes far more red-rimmed than they had been when she left, the police had finally arrived to question Charlie. Two cops flanked his chair; a thin blonde woman with short, curly hair and a no-nonsense look was peppering him with questions, while a muscular man with a walrus mustache and prematurely grey hair jotted things in a notebook and occasionally asked a follow-up question. Charlie looked like a rat between two cats. A third cop, a taller man with a coach's buzz-cut of brown, stood near the doorway as if he were expecting a felon to come bursting into the room at any minute.

Winston waved her over to the open seat on the other side of Egon. The blond man's elbows were propped on his knees, and his head hung low between them. As Janine slid into the chair, she saw that Egon's eyes were tightly closed, every muscle in his face tensed. Instinctively, she laid one hand in the center of his back and began rubbing it in small circles. His face didn't visibly change, but she could feel his shoulders uncoil just a fraction. Winston had one hand on Egon's right arm; his own features were pretty tense, too.

Egon lowered his head even further and took a long, ragged, deep, deliberate breath. He removed his glasses, brushed his eyes with his fingers, and repeated the deep breath twice more, sounding a little less ragged. Then he slowly straightened his spine. He shot them each a glance and whispered "Thank you" so quietly Janine wasn't quite sure she wasn't lip-reading it more than hearing it. Then Egon put his glasses back on and straightened his shoulders, and the mask fell across him again. "Has there been any change in their condition?" he asked, and his voice held only a trace of the pain that had so thoroughly blanketed his features just a moment before.

For an instant, Janine spared a corner of her mind to passionately hate Egon's father for teaching him to deal with the world by stuffing his emotions into a corner of his mind and stomping them down. The physicist was one of the most deeply feeling people she'd ever known, but he'd been raised with only the one tool for dealing with his emotions, and when repression failed him, it just about broke him. Peter had been working on him since he'd met him, and he'd grown, but in the face of something as terrible as the loss of his two closest friends in the world, and without Peter to guide him, he fell back on his old habits, hard. The presence of his _second_-best two friends in the world might help, but they might not be enough to draw him from his shell if . . . if the worst happened.

She shook her head. No, she'd have to trust that Egon would treasure Peter's and Ray's memory enough not to undo all the work they'd done on him. And she'd do her best, as would Winston - not to replace them, but to continue their efforts to support Egon.

"Not a bit," she answered, hoping that he'd take the head-shaking as part of that answer. "In either way. They're not dying, but they're not waking up, either." She exhaled sharply; seeing the two youngest Ghostbusters like that had hurt. Her feelings for them were more complex than hers for Egon, but that didn't make them any less sharp. She shifted her gaze to Winston; his was easier to meet. "I got the same sense from them that you did, Egon. Like they were . . . empty. Is there any chance that you could use the PKE meters to check for that? I know you can tell when someone's been possessed, when there's two spirits in there. Can you check the opposite, to see whether there's no spirit in there at all?"

Egon looked at her uncomprehendingly for a second, then his eyes widened with two competing emotions. He smacked himself on the forehead with the hand Winston wasn't still gripping. "Of course! Janine, thank you, I am an idiot. Yes, although I might need to re-calibrate the meter - a living spirit in a living body would have a PKE signature, but no ectoplasmic readings. Let me start by measuring their biorhythm readings. I should have thought to do this before we left the apartments. Winston," he continued, rising to his feet and unhooking the PKE meter from his belt, "would you please get -" his voice stumbled, but he continued - "get Ray's meter from Ecto? I might need to take PKE and biorhythm readings simultaneously, and I cannot do that with a single meter." He paused, then squeezed Janine's shoulder gratefully. "I am truly an idiot. Thank you for asking what should have been obvious."

"Anytime, Egon." She smiled up at him, daring to hope that this might help.

The cop with the buzz-cut stopped Winston at the door. "Where do you think you're going in the middle of an investigation, buddy?" he snarled.

Winston shook his head. "We have a meter that took readings at the drug house." The blonde cop had already taken statements from him and Egon, and she'd confirmed what Egon and Janine had guessed, that the place had been used for smuggling heroin and possibly several other types of illegal drugs. They hadn't yet been able to identify the bodies, but they had a list of missing persons whom they thought might have been involved in the local drug trade and were checking for any identifying information. "It might have information stored on it that could be helpful to your investigators." It was a bit of a bluff, but it might well still be true. He was just glad he wasn't dealing with Inspector Frump, who would have assumed that the Ghostbusters were trying to scam him.

The cop scowled, and glanced at the other two. The officer with the mustache had heard the exchange, and he waved at the one at the door to let Winston through. He waved back, and headed for the elevator.

\---

Peter half wondered whether Ray was deliberately doing this to freak him out. He wasn't floating, exactly, but every time he moved, he ended up at a different height or angle from the one he'd had before. The effect was extraordinarily unnerving, and was getting to be close enough to levitation as to make no odds. That Peter knew he could probably manage the trick, too, if he closed his eyes and stopped thinking about where the floor was supposed to be, didn't help at all.

It also seemed to be confusing the three guys they'd found - not that it was difficult. They'd proven to be spectacularly unhelpful; their time in this place seemed to have largely wiped their memories. (At least, that was Ray's theory, which redoubled Peter's determination to find a way back to their world as soon as possible.) It had taken several minutes of coaching for Peter to even get their names out.

The one who'd woken up at their approach was named Carlos Vargas, and remembered a few things from what all three of them merely referred to as Before. He'd had a girlfriend, who might have been pregnant, and they had been talking about getting married even if it turned out to just be a scare. His mother lived somewhere in Jersey, and his father was dead - an accident on a construction site. He'd had a job in a grocery warehouse, but it didn't pay much and he'd taken on odd jobs for extra money. He thought one of them might have involved delivering something to Peter's dad's apartments, but he wasn't sure. He reacted to Peter's description of the phantasm by whimpering and closing his eyes, but he refused to say whether he'd touched it or where he'd seen it.

The African-American bodybuilder type had remembered even less. His name was Michael David, and he said he'd been a boxer with a day job driving a cab. He thought both his parents were still living, and that they lived in rural Georgia outside of Columbus, but he couldn't remember their names, or whether he was an only child. He didn't think he was married. He'd shared an apartment with some other cabbies; he thought one of them was named Ankush, but he only recalled it because it was unusual, not because he remembered anything else about the guy. He didn't recognize the description of the smuggling house. He denied remembering the ghost, but he'd flinched at the description, and Peter suspected he was lying about that.

The third guy, with the salt-and-pepper hair, hadn't even remembered his own name. He kept zoning out; whenever someone wasn't speaking directly to him, or he to them, his eyes glazed over or slipped closed, and he began mumbling again, although as far as Peter could tell, he wasn't forming words. There was something incredibly disturbing about his watery grey eyes, but Peter couldn't figure out what. He didn't remember any family. He thought he'd lived in the Bronx, but he wasn't sure and couldn't give an address. He didn't remember the smuggling house. And his reaction to Peter's description of the phantasm had been extremely unnerving.

He'd smiled, and said it was God, and it had come when he had prayed for it.

Peter sat cross-legged on the 'floor.' Ray was doing the same thing about a yard away. He was deep in thought, not looking at Peter, and thus he was also about a foot off of Peter's 'floor' and tilted at about a twenty degree angle.

"You got anything so far?" asked Peter, more because he was hoping Ray would change his vertical axis than because he thought Ray might have figured something out and not told him.

"Well, I'm pretty sure that Class Six isn't a god, and I'm honestly confused as to how anyone could mistake it for one." Ray turned back towards Peter without using his hands or his feet. _Oh, boy,_ Peter thought. Ray continued drifting around, frowned, and put out a hand to steady himself. It didn't seem to touch anything, but Ray stopped turning. "I mean, it was powerful. And it seemed to have some way of fascinating us, or at least making us want to reach for it. And it did transport us here, wherever here is. But it didn't blast us when we were trying to catch it. It wasn't nearly as powerful as any of the demons we've faced, much less a demigod like Gozer." Ray scowled; it was an odd expression on him. "Winston might be more help here than me; I've never had anything I'd call a religious experience. Spiritual, yeah, but not . . . " He waved his arms around, which caused him to tilt slightly backwards and begin rotating again. "Not the big-G in-the-beginning-creating-heaven-and-earth-type God." He put out his hand again and abruptly changed direction so that he was facing Peter the right way.

"Yeah, me neither." Peter shrugged. "I did some research on mystical experiences during my doctoral work, but that was mostly in the context of other psi phenomena - astral projections, precognitive visions, trance states in general, that sort of stuff. Hell, the one time I dropped acid, I didn't get anything mystic at all, and that's supposed to be an entheogen."

"A what?" Ray's expression of confusion lifted almost immediately; Peter could almost watch him take apart the word. "Something that produces a god? Oh, an experience of a god. Like the stuff shamans used to go on vision quests." Ray grinned. "I used to tease Egon about that in college, that he had to be growing psilocybin mushrooms in his fungus collection."

"That actually happened the year before I met him. Did he ever tell you about that?" Peter grinned a little at the memory of Egon confessing the experience; Ray looked surprised. "No, I guess he didn't. Well, it _was_ the Seventies. He only tried it once. He was hoping for a vision quest kind of thing, and mostly he just got complicated geometric hallucinations. Trust Spengs to manage to have a math trip." Peter made a disgusted face, but amusement twinkled in his eyes. "At the end, just before it wore off, he got really paranoid and barricaded himself in his apartment, with chairs in front of all the doors, including the closet doors. Oh, crap, I just realized why he did that, and why he was embarrassed when he told me about that part."

"The Bogeyman." Ray nodded. "Egon must have been afraid that he'd pop out. I almost wonder why he didn't. And now I feel bad for joking about it."

"Must've been busy scaring someone else. And you couldn't've known, Ray; you don't need to feel guilty about it. Anyway, Spengs swore he'd never do it again. I tried to talk him into trying it with a guide - yours truly, of course - a couple of years later, but he'd decided that the paranoia part wasn't worth the chance of having the entheogenic experience, and he'd moved on to other areas of the paranormal."

Ray was silent for a moment, drifting off of vertical again. "Peter, Winston referred to the phantasm as a bad trip. I've never been under the influence of anything stronger than alcohol. Did it really look like a drug hallucination?"

Peter frowned. "Kinda. The weird colors, at least, were pretty psychedelic. Why?"

"I'm just speculating." Ray was outright floating now. There wasn't any pretense of there being a floor; he was weightless and drifting. "What if someone was, um, tripping when they died, and left a ghost, and an absorbing spirit absorbed that one? What would that do to the spirit that sucked them up? Could it change it?"

"Well, maybe." Peter thought about it. "I'm not an expert on psychotropic drugs. The more serious I got about psychology, the less the idea of personally 'experimenting' with them in uncontrolled environments appealed to me, and I didn't go the medical route. But a Class Three spirit that used to be a person is usually stuck in the emotional state it was in when the person died. If that was a chemically altered state . . . it's possible."

Ray unfolded from his cross-legged stance and drifted over to the other three men. They had fallen back into their previous torpor, although Carlos's eyes were still open. Ray carefully looked them over, then reached down and pushed the oldest one's sleeves back. He frowned, and then drifted back over to Peter.

"They've all got a needle mark on their right arms," Ray stated in a slightly shaky voice. "The one who can't remember his name has several." The sight had obviously disturbed him; Ray hated needles.

Peter winced. "I'm pretty sure Dad's apartments were a drug house before. I can't think of anything else that would make them hot enough for someone to want to unload them that fast, on Dad no less. Maybe these guys were all customers?" He frowned. "Still, though, you wouldn't inject a hallucinogen."

"Maybe. None of them mentioned remembering that, but you wouldn't necessarily admit that to a stranger."

Peter looked at Ray floating in front of him and shivered. "Gaah, Ray, would you cut that out? Hovering like that, I half expect to be able to see right through you. You look like a ghost."

Ray looked like Peter's words had stung him. He looked at himself, as if he hadn't realized quite what he was doing, then back at Peter with an apologetic expression. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, a look of concentration on his face like he'd had when he'd walked the vertical loop.

He went translucent, like a sheet of frosted glass, all at once.

"Holy shit," gasped Peter.

The younger Ghostbuster opened his eyes, and looked through his hand at his feet.

"Oh, _damn_," muttered Ray.

\---

The cops seemed to be wrapping up their interview with Charlie when Winston got back to the waiting room. Neither Egon nor Janine were there; Winston shot a glance at the nurse at the duty station, a heavyset woman with black hair and narrow eyes. Janine had introduced herself to her earlier; her name was Gloria Jackson, and she'd mentioned that she had a young son who idolized the Ghostbusters, and Peter in particular. She glanced down the hallway towards room 304, and then nodded once. He mouthed a 'thank you' to her and headed down the hallway.

The door was open slightly. Winston pushed it open very gently, so as not to disturb its occupants, although he knew that was probably an unnecessary precaution. Peter and Ray - or their bodies, at least - were still unconscious, and Egon was so focused on the PKE meter he was running over their vacant forms that he showed no sign of being aware of anything else. Janine was the only one who noticed his arrival; she gave him a tight, uncertain smile.

"Anything?" he asked her, deciding to leave Egon to his pondering. She seemed to have the same idea, and motioned him out into the hallway.

"Well, he's in the middle of a biorhythm pass. He thinks he'll know something when he's done with that, especially if he gets the same results from both of them." She removed her glasses and ran a hand down her face. "He got really tense after the first pass and said something about the residuals being too high," she continued, re-settling her glasses on the bridge of her nose. "I didn't ask questions because he was - well, you see how he is now. But it sounded like - I think he's changed from thinking they're gone and there's nothing he can do, to thinking that something awful has happened to them but we might have a chance." She glanced through the door at Peter's empty face, and shuddered. "I hope he's right. I mean, I hope it's not so bad. But when he thought they were just _gone_ \- I was scared we were going to lose him, too."

Winston let out a breath. "Yeah, I was worried about that, too. Like he was going to stuff everything but that control facade back into himself, to keep the pain from leaking out. But after he went off on Charlie like that, I'm not sure he could do that forever."

"I couldn't," answered Egon from next to Ray's bed. Winston and Janine exchanged a guilty look, and ducked back in to join the physicist. He gave them a small, tight smile and continued, "Nor would I wish to. That would ill serve Peter's memory, after all he has done to coax, prod, and cajole me out of my emotional shell." He adjusted his glasses and looked at the meter again. "I have performed biorhythm and PKE scans of both of them, and while the results are disconcerting, the situation may not be as hopeless as I had feared." He took a lingering look at the two fallen Ghostbusters, and then gestured the standing team members back towards the waiting room. "This will be easier to show you if we have table space."

Winston commandeered the coffee table in the waiting area. The blonde police officer and the short-haired one had left; the older one was sitting a chair away from Charlie, sipping a cup of vending-machine coffee. Charlie stared sullenly at a soda can and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Scooping the magazines off the table and onto one of the empty chairs took almost no time, and Egon set the PKE meter down in the exact center, gesturing for Janine and Winston to watch closely.

"All right. Here's Peter's normal biorhythm." He tapped a button and twiddled the dial; a waveform played back across the screen, accompanied by a geometric pattern. "Here's what his biorhythm looks like now." A waveform that looked very similar, but much reduced in size, played across the bottom of the screen; the geometric pattern was also shrunk, and seemed to be less symmetrical. Janine tapped the screen with a fingernail. "That's different, isn't it?"

Egon nodded. "Very good, Janine. After Peter was possessed by Watt, he had a similar alteration in that part of his biorhythm reading, but it was asymmetrical in the other direction, and much spikier. Rather than there being anomalous, externally generated PKE energy left in him, his natural PKE energy is significantly damped. Now, here's Ray's." Again, the current reading had perhaps a fifth the amplitude of the normal reading, and the meter indicated a reduction in normal PKE.

"So, that phantasm drained them both of their natural store of PKE? Will it come back on its own?" Winston dared to sound hopeful. Behind them, Charlie stirred from his miserable reverie.

"I cannot be sure yet without more data. I will set up the second PKE meter to take biorhythm readings at regular intervals; we can see if there is any change over time. Now, here's a regular PKE reading of the room they're in." Egon played another recorded image. Janine couldn't make heads or tails of it, but Winston frowned. "Just residual readings, but they're residuals of a Class Six, and for being taken several hours after contact - that's too strong, right?" Egon's head bobbed hard enough to make the ragged remnants of his pipecurl bounce. "_Much_ too strong. I theorize that the Class Six has continued to influence Peter and Ray somehow, despite being trapped. They both appeared to be confused or even slightly dazed even before it stunned them."

Winston looked thoughtful. "You think whatever it did to zone them out is the same thing that's keeping them under now? It was draining them of their PKE even before it did its little shockwave thing?"

"Again, not enough information to say for sure, but it's a plausible theory." Egon chewed on his lower lip in thought. "Peter and Ray are both somewhat more psi-sensitive than you and I are, Winston. If that was what it was seeking, it would make sense for it to try to corner them instead of us."

"So what can we do about it?" Janine burst in, ready to do _something_ instead of watch.

"Right now, we need to gather more information. Winston, may I have Ray's - I mean, the other PKE meter?" Winston unhooked it from his belt and handed it to Egon. "Let me make sure it saves the previous set of readings before I reset it." Egon began toggling the switch and the dial; his long fingers slipped. "No, no, save the data, don't play it back," he grumbled, reaching for the dial again - and then he froze.

"What is it, Egon?" Winston and Janine spoke nearly in chorus, then realized a third voice had joined them. Janine shot a glare across the room and shushed Charlie, but the older man was staring at Egon, his eyes wide open.

Egon twisted the knob again, and the replayed readings reflected in his glasses. His hands began to shake, and he set down Ray's PKE meter and took his own back up. With a few motions, he brought up another display on his meter, and stared at it for several long, silent minutes. Then he looked at Winston, his eyes frantic. "Approximately what time was it when you and Peter opened the sealed space under the stairway?"

Winston pressed his lips together, trying to remember. "We got there right at four. We took maybe fifteen minutes to search the place. I don't know how long the sawing took - maybe another ten minutes, tops?"

Charlie spoke up, and his voice was rough and raw. "It was four twenty-nine by my watch when you broke the panel out. I remember checking the time and thinking I shouldn't have brought you out, that it was less than half an hour and you'd already messed up my walls, and you hadn't fired a shot." He shook his head slowly. "If I'd imagined that my boy would be hurt, I'd've never dragged you out of the firehouse, I swear. Or Ray, either," he added hastily.

Egon gazed across the room at Charlie with the same regard he might have given a piece of malfunctioning lab equipment. The effort it took to keep his voice level was audible as he asked "What time does your watch say it is now?"

"Seven fifteen."

Egon carefully set the dials on both PKE meters. "I'm going to play back the recordings on both meters starting from that point in time. This one," he said, raising the one on his left, "is my meter, and it was set to focus on the Class Six readings. This one is Ray's, and it was set to focus on the Class Three readings." He returned his meter to the table and tapped both switches simultaneously. Winston and Janine craned their necks forward to watch the readings as they played through the encounter, from the entity's emergence into activity at 4:31 on the meters through until -

"That must be where it set off the shockwave effect," commented Winston as the Class Six readings, which had been fluctuating for several seconds, suddenly spiked. As they settled back down, their baseline level was higher, but its waveform seemed slightly different. Janine turned to ask Egon what might cause that and found him staring at Ray's meter.

"Sorry, my man, I was looking at your meter. What happened to the - oh, great," groaned Winston. Janine crowded over to look over his shoulder, but she couldn't see what they were looking at. "So what happened?" she prodded.

Egon shook his head, and dialed the meter back half a minute. As the readings played through again, the complex waveform spiked, went chaotic, and then settled back into a larger, different, even more complex waveform.

The physicist ran his hands through his hair, then muttered "Paper, I need paper."

Winston began searching his pockets for the little notebook he often carried with him. Janine looked thoughtful, then got up and started down the hallway opposite from the waiting room. Egon fumbled in his breast pocket and came up with a cheap ballpoint pen; he frowned at it, then seemingly decided it would do.

A few minutes later Janine returned with a dozen sheets of clean paper. Egon took them from her with a distracted "Thank you," and began reproducing the waveform from the screen.

"How did you find that?" asked Winston.

Janine shrugged. "I'm a secretary. I can smell a photocopier half a floor away."

After several minutes of scribbling, Egon sat up. "Look at this." He held up two different waveform graphs. "This one is the original Class Three composite waveform from when the entity first became active. This one," he pointed at the other, "is the new Class Three composite from - the end of the recording." Janine nodded; Winston took the two from Egon and squinted at them. The physicist held up another sheet of paper. "By the process of subtraction of ordinates, this is the waveform that must have been added to the first reading to get the second."

Winston looked at it with the desperation of someone trying to remember high school trigonometry. "And that's still too complex to be one Class Three, isn't it?"

"Correct." Egon forced himself to take a deep breath and held up yet another sheet. "Here's my best guess at what two waveforms added together would give that reading."

Janine's jaw dropped. "But that's - " She snatched up Egon's PKE meter and turned the dial forward to the next recording.

Peter's biorhythm waveform matched the bottom one from Egon's last diagram.

Winston took the meter from her, gently. "And the other one's Ray's?" Egon nodded gravely.

"My boy's still alive?" whimpered Charlie, now hovering behind Egon's chair.

"No thanks to you," Janine snarled.

Egon blinked. He set down his notes and rose, slowly to his feet. "Winston, I'm going to go get the trap from Ecto."

"Egon, wait," Winston called as he caught the scientist's arm. "We can't let it out in here; what if it gets loose and messes with the other patients?"

"But Peter and Ray are _in there_." Egon whirled and bolted for the door; Winston dropped back onto the chair and declined to chase after him.

\---

"Stop it, Ray, you're totally creeping me out." Peter was on his feet and painfully aware that there wasn't really a floor underneath him, that it was the force of his expectations alone that was keeping him from floating like Ray was.

The younger Ghostbuster was still staring at his own hands. "Wow, this is fascinating!"

Peter grimaced. "If you say it's great, I may have to throw up, Ray."

"No, no, it's actually not good at all. Peter, I think we're ghosts!" Ray's eyes were wide with amazement, and a touch of worry. "We could be in serious trouble."

"Wait, you're telling me we're _dead_? And that it _could be_ a serious problem?" Peter put a hand to his temple and clutched at his hair; it felt solid enough, but - "And that still doesn't explain where we are."

Ray looked around. "Peter," he started slowly, "have you ever asked Slimer what the inside of one of our traps looks like?"

"You've gotta be - " Peter trailed off. On impulse, he poked Ray in the shoulder, expecting to pass through or at least get slimed. Instead, Ray felt as solid as ever, if a little cold. "You don't feel like a ghost."

"But if you're one, too, we'd still be equally solid. Can ghosts pass through each other? I don't think they can. I can't remember seeing it ever happen." The worry was winning out over the amazement.

"You think we're in a trap? Ray, it's huge. Our traps aren't that big, are they?"

"I don't know. I never thought about what it would look like to something _inside_ the trap. But it does seem like it would be smaller, doesn't it?"

Peter waved in the direction of the other three men. "So they're the three Class Threes we were detecting earlier?" He flashed back on the three bodies hidden beneath the stairway. These men were the right general sizes, and the remaining clothing seemed to match - there hadn't been enough flesh left to tell much about their faces.

He flew over to Carlos. Oh, god, he was flying too. Crap. "Hey, hey, wake up. We need to talk to you again."

The glaze slowly drained from Carlos's eyes. "What now, man?" He rubbed at his temples, as if it would help him concentrate.

"Are you dead?" Ray popped in. Peter lowered his head and groaned. "Yeah, good one, Ray. Nice and easy, let's take it."

Carlos's eyes seemed to cloud over. "I don't know . . . wait, no, you're right, I am!" He sat up, startled. "We all are, all three of us! I remember. They didn't want to shoot us because the guns would attract attention, so they shot us up with something instead, an overdose. We were tied up so we wouldn't struggle. I tried, but I couldn't get loose. Then he - " he gestured at the nameless man. "He'd already taken something, he was buying from them. Michael, he brought him there in his cab, he was waiting outside. I was on my way to see Luz - she lived in the same neighborhood. Some guy came out of the house, and he was - wrong. Having a bad drug reaction, raving, bleeding from his eyes. I think he was dying. God, I think there was light coming out of his skin. The crack-house guys, they came out and grabbed everyone they thought might have been a witness. They tied the three of us up in the crawlspace - there's a false back to the cupboard - and then they shot us up, and they threw the dying guy in after us. He," Carlos pointed at the third man again, "he started singing, something I couldn't understand. He's still singing it. And this, this _thing_," he gestured with his hands as if he were squeezing a ball, " came out of him, out of the other guy. There wasn't even a body left. Maybe he wasn't a person to begin with; maybe he was this thing in disguise. I don't know. I couldn't struggle; I could barely move. And then the thing did something, and I wanted to touch it, wanted it more than I'd ever wanted anything in the world. The next thing I knew, we were here, and we've been here ever since. We tried exploring, but we were still so tired. And we couldn't remember what happened. Michael and I couldn't, anyway. I still can't understand what he's saying most of the time."

He fell silent; his shoulders sagged, as if the sudden rush of memory had drained him. Then he looked at Peter and Ray, sudden understanding on his face. "It got you, too, huh?"

Peter nodded. "Yes, it did." He leaned forward, and put his hands on Carlos's shoulders. "Were you dead when you came here?"

"Huh?" Carlos looked confused, then just puzzled. "I . . . don't know. I think, when I wanted to touch it, that I could still move, a little. I could still feel the ropes. Would I have still felt them if I was all the way dead?"

"Probably not," answered Ray. "And that means the phantasm absorbed you while you were still alive. I'm sorry - I'm pretty sure you're not, now. I think we saw your bodies."

Carlos sat back. "No, we knew we were dead. We - I think it told us. Or it noticed, and we knew." He scrubbed at his eyes with his fists, trying to stay fully aware. "Luz. I remember her name. My girlfriend. She might be pregnant. My god, she might have to raise my kid without me."

Peter thought about the state the bodies had been in. "When did all this happen?"

Carlos's face buckled with the effort to remember. "February. The 17th, I think. But I know it was February. Lent hadn't started yet."

"What year?"

"1990."

Peter leaned back. "It's September now. Ray, shouldn't the bodies be, uh . . . "

Ray sucked on his lower lip and became solid-looking again. "If this thing fed off of all their energies - PKE, biorhythm, and chemical - then it might have induced a sort of ectoplasmic mummification. That would explain why the spirit was inactive when we got there; it was using their bodies as a receptacle. Maybe they would have disintegrated like the fourth body did, eventually."

"Seven months, man." Carlos wrapped his arms around his knees. "She's gotta know I'm not coming back. I hope she doesn't think I ran out on her." He grabbed Peter's arm. "Are you guys dead?"

"I really, really hope not," replied Peter; Ray nodded his agreement.

"Can you tell her for me? Luz Perez. Four doors over from the crack house. Townhouse apartment with pink paint. She lives with her mom and three brothers."

"If we get back, we'll do our best." Peter was thinking hard. "Ray, if we're not in a trap, then we're - "

"Inside the phantasm. I think it absorbed us when it stunned us. I hope the guys can catch it." Ray shuddered. He drifted over to the nameless man, and dipped his head until he could hear what the stranger was saying. Peter and Carlos stared in silence; Peter realized he was holding his breath.

Ray looked back at Peter and shook his head. "Glossolalia. It's not real language; it's just a string of automatic syllables strung together."

Peter nodded. "I remember. It's a feature of some trance states, including the ones induced by churches that do 'speaking in tongues.' But what kind of guy goes to a drug house to buy . . . whatever it was, speaks in tongues, and thinks that thing was God?"

Ray shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think there's enough left of him to find out. The phantasm already absorbed most of his memories." He looked down at the dead man without a name. "I think he didn't fight very hard to keep them."

Suddenly the whiteness around them flared into a whirlpool of glowing colors. Peter and Ray jumped together, clinging against the maelstrom that surged around them; Peter found Carlos gripping his other elbow. Funny, the phantasm had made barely a whisper from the outside, after its initial appearance; in here, it howled like a hurricane.

"It's become active again!" shouted Ray. "Peter, you head that way, and I'll head that way - maybe we can escape it."

"I'm coming too," Carlos hollered against the howling chaos that surrounded them.

"Okay, you try straight up," ordered Peter. "On three - one, two . . . "

He was interrupted by an irresistible force dragging him away from the other two.

\---

Egon had returned with the trap and all four proton packs. Janine was shrugging herself into Ray's pack. Winston looked at the other two options, and decided on the cop - at least he knew something about weapons.

"You know I absolutely should not be letting you do this inside the hospital," the police officer - his badge read "Golan" - said. He examined the pack with suspicion. Then he sighed. "But I can see you're determined to do it, and the only thing I could really do at this point would be to throw you out of here. I heard everything you said about your buddies. Is there any way you could do this outside?"

"Only if we could convince the nurses to let us move Peter and Ray as well," answered Egon, recalibrating his thrower with a screwdriver.

The nurse at the desk shook her head. "Nothing doing. They need to be constantly monitored. Their blood pressure was only stabilized with medications; if those began to wear off, we'd need to know immediately." She eyed the trap. "You're really going to let a ghost _out_ of one of those things?"

"We need to separate Peter and Ray from the rest of the phantasm," explained Winston. "We'll put what's left back in the trap as soon as we've pulled them out." He hoped he sounded reassuring.

Egon finished with his thrower, and started on Winston's, which was leaning against one of the seats. "These two throwers are set to Peter's and Ray's exact biorhythmic frequencies." He glanced at his PKE meter, and tweaked a connection with the screwdriver. "They should be able to pull the two of them out from the mass of the Class Six. While Winston and I are doing that, Janine and Officer Golan will hold the phantasm, so it can't take the opportunity to escape. Once we've separated out Peter and Ray, we will re-open the trap and contain the phantasm again."

Janine crossed her fingers. Somewhere behind her came the sound of Charlie knocking on the wood of a side table.

"I'm finished. Here you go, Winston." Egon helped his remaining partner into his pack; Winston pulled his thrower and powered up. Egon, Janine, and the cop all did the same, and spaced themselves around the trap. Nurse Jackson crouched down behind her desk; Charlie did the same behind a chair.

"Trap open," called Egon, and stepped on the trigger. The trap doors sprang open, and the familiar wedge of white light emerged. From the trap rose a ball of light, first white, then bluish, then a day-glow whirlpool. Its arms stretched out in all directions, waving, reaching for the humans standing around it as the trap snapped shut with a click. Both PKE meters began to whistle and vibrate wildly.

"That's gorgeous," murmured Janine, reaching towards it with her off hand. Her eyes began to glaze over.

"Janine, no!" ordered Egon, and she reeled back, shaking her head. The physicist's eyes flashed lighting once more, and he shouted "Blast it!" Four streams shot out; all but the cop's hit it dead on, even as it tried to wheel away, and Officer Golan's stream came back and caught it as it attempted another evasive maneuver.

The phantasm convulsed. Two pulses of light - one a rosy red, the other grass green - appeared at what might have been its surface, where Egon's and Winston's streams held it. The pseudopodal mass began to elongate, stretching as the proton streams pulled at it. A third pulse, bright yellow, appeared at the top of the phantasm, tugging it weakly in a third direction.

"What's that?" shrieked Janine over the sizzle of the throwers.

Egon spared a glance at the PKE meter. "It looks like one of the other Class Threes is also attempting an escape!"

"Good for it! C'mon, guys, let's go, c'mon, Peter, Ray, fight it . . . " Winston held his stream steady against the silent bucking of the phantasm, which was no longer even remotely spherical; it was stretched into an irregular triangle and vibrating madly.

Suddenly, it burst like a balloon. Five spheres of light shot out; Egon and Winston shut off their streams, and the red and green spheres flew down the hallway. Nurse Jackson ducked out from behind her desk and scrambled after them. A violet one from the center of the phantasm shot the other way, out the window, leaving a faint streak of ectoplasm as it went. The yellow one ricocheted off the ceiling and barely missed Charlie, who dodged like a running back and then fell over a chair; Officer Golan's stream followed it to the ceiling, where it shattered one of the fluorescent lights, and he took his finger off the firing button in surprise. The fifth one, silvery and wispy, hovered for a moment, flickered, and then dissolved.

No longer three-dimensional, a colorful ectoplasmic film fluttered in Janine's lone stream like a flag secured at only one corner. Winston turned back to it, added his stream to the containment, and called, "Hey, Egon, hit it!" Without looking up from his meter, Egon stomped the trigger again, and the remnant slid in without a struggle.

Egon, Winston, and Janine stared at each other for a moment, then turned and ran for the open door down the hall. As they piled into the room, they were greeted by three broad smiles.

"Boy, have we got a story to tell you, guys! It was -" Ray swallowed what he was about to say, and substituted "really weird!" at the last second.

"Yeah, and we gotta do something about the inside of the traps, because that really messed with my head," complained Peter, grin still plastered on his face.

"I would love to hear all your observations on it later," said Egon, and then he swooped down on both men and crushed them to him in a two-armed bear hug. They threw themselves into the embrace wholeheartedly, and swept Janine and Winston into it as well.

"If you knock out your IV lines, I really will throw you all out," groused the nurse, winning her a glare from Janine and a wheedling look from Peter.

"Is he . . . is my boy all right?" came a voice from the hallway. Peter looked up and saw his father, smaller than he had ever looked before, peering around the edge of the doorway. Winston blocked his view of most of the room; he couldn't make eye contact with anyone.

Peter wrinkled his nose in disgust, then threw himself back on the bed and assumed a look of anguish just as Charlie managed to squirm into the room. "I'll live, Dad," he moaned. "I'll survive, and so will Ray, who I will remind you also got sucked into that awful thing with me." He shivered and rolled his eyes. "It was horrible. Such terrifying things . . . " he groped wildly in the air above him. "Things man was not meant to know."

On the other side, Ray's eyebrows went up, and he let himself go limp in Egon's and Janine's arms. "Oh, my god," he wailed, "you can't imagine it, Mr. Venkman! The other side - it could drive a man mad!" He waved his hands around, flailing. "I saw - I saw - _vir levis in vestito malo_!"

Charlie shrank back. "Boys, I never meant - "

Peter sank back against the bed. He looked at his father with eyes full of otherworldly sorrow. "It's okay, Dad. We're back. We're back among the living, and that's all that matters." He drew a labored breath that made the machine next to him quaver. "We'll - we'll survive. I'm sure, in time, we'll forget that nightmare realm and be able to face the sun again." His eyes squeezed closed; a single tear trickled down one cheek. Janine's shoulders quivered; she turned to face the wall and tried to look as if she were suppressing tears.

"_Stultus es_. We forgive you, Mr Venkman," Ray cried in a weak voice, leaning into Egon. "They brought us back. We . . . forgive . . . " His eyelids fluttered closed with a sigh like his heart was breaking.

The nurse wheeled around. "Mr. - Venkman, was it? - I think you've done quite enough for one day. Go back to the waiting room; I'll send these others out to keep you company in just a minute." She shooed him out and closed the door.

Everyone waited until Charlie's steps faded away down the hallway, and then Peter's and Ray's eyes met. Ray let out a snort, and then both of them were convulsing with smothered laughter. Janine and Winston joined them, sniggering behind hands clapped over their mouths. Egon looked back and forth between his two friends returned to him, threw back his head, and laughed so hard he slid down the wall. Gloria glared at them as she finished checking their vitals, but she added a giggle or two of her own.

"_Vestito malo_? Really, Ray, your Latin is rusty," protested Egon from the floor, his arms wrapped around sides aching with mirth.

"What would _you_ call that jacket?" asked Ray in his most innocent voice, which set Peter off again.

"A _calamitas_." Egon smiled and hauled himself back to his feet. "Such histrionics from you two were entirely unexpected, I must admit."

Janine shook her head. "I'd expect that sort of thing from Peter, but Ray, you?" She reached out and rumpled his auburn hair; he grinned back at her. "Hey, I took a semester of theater in high school," he protested.

The nurse shook her head. "You both seem to be fully recovered. Let me call Dr. Irwin. I suspect he'll go ahead and discharge you this evening." She left the room, making a notation on the clipboard at the door and muttering something about scoundrels of all ages.

"Hey, could one of you Ghostbusters come back out here?" called a voice from the hallway. Winston stuck his head out the door, and saw Officer Golan waving the proton thrower he'd been wearing at a barely visible specter, who was holding up his hands in the "don't shoot" gesture.

"Hey guys, one of the other Class Threes is sticking around." Winston went for his power switch; Peter sat back up and said "Hey, wait, Winston. Which one is it?"

He squinted down the hallway. "Five foot six, maybe, looks Chicano, wearing jeans and a concert t-shirt I can't read?"

Peter relaxed. "No, that's Carlos. He's okay. Tell him to come down here, and we'll take care of him."

Egon frowned. "Are you sure? Even a Class Three can be dangerous."

"He's not," piped up Ray. "He helped us make a break for it at the end there."

Carlos drifted through the door beside Winston. "Guys, you gotta get me back to Luz. I have to know."

"Don't worry," promised Ray. "We'll take you back as soon as we can."

The ghost shifted miserably. "I haven't . . . it's still so hard for me to think. I just want to sleep. But I have to tell her. I _have_ to know."

"Easy, there," said Peter soothingly. "Don't worry, we'll get you to your girl."

Janine looked around the room, and then unhooked Ray's trap from the pack she wore. "If you'd like, we can put you in storage until we get where you need to go."

Ray started to protest, but Carlos held one hand up. "It's . . . safe in there? I can't get sucked up by some other monster ghost?"

A realization dawned on Peter's face. "Yes, it's safe. It'll be boring, but it's safe."

"Then I'd rather be in there." Janine's expression softened as she set the trap on the floor. All the humans looked away as she opened it; Carlos stepped into the light and vanished into it.

\---

Winston drove Ecto-1 past the divided house practically mummified by yellow "Police Line, Do Not Cross" tape, and looked up and down the street for a parking spot. Ray counted four buildings out loud, sighing with relief at the sight of faded pink paint and fuchsia trim. As Peter and Ray clambered out of the backseat, the blinking trap dangled from Ray's hand; Egon aimed his PKE meter at them as they arranged the trap on the sidewalk.

"Are you sure you don't want one of us to provide cover with a thrower?" Egon asked, eyeing the trap with suspicion.

"Not as long as you're sure we have the right trap," replied Peter.

"No, that pincushion's right here," said Janine, a wry look on her face. "After he tried to nab me the same way he got you guys, I'm taking this whole thing very personally." She had, in fact, been the one who realized that they couldn't afford to mix up the traps. While Egon could tell which was which with the meters, and technically it was possible to determine the class of the contained ghost by watching the blinking light on the trap, Janine had decided to make sure that there would be no mistakes. She had borrowed some masking tape from Nurse Johnson's station and taped the Class Six's trap closed.

"I should leave you boys to your business." Charlie Venkman sounded remarkably chastised. While Peter and Ray had assured him that they were fully recovered, and in fact barely remembered the horrors they'd witnessed within the phantasm, when they signed themselves out of the hospital - and then made a point of demonstrating their miraculous recovery by joking around in the car - their actual endangerment followed by their little improv act seemed to have cracked his usual shell.

"You can stick around for this, if you want, Dad," Peter said, a little too brightly, and then continued in a lower voice, "It'll be the only good thing to come out of today's fiasco."

"No, I've had enough of that little light show to last me a while," Charlie shuddered. He looked at the ground, then out into the street, then at the pink townhouse, then back down the street at his rather compromised property. Suddenly he whirled around, and grabbed Peter by the shoulders. "Dad, what - " started Peter, as his father pulled him into a bone-crushing hug. The older man's jacket smelled faintly of cheap cigars and expensive beer, a smell that Peter remembered from his father's arrivals home in his childhood.

"I thought I'd lost you," mumbled Charlie. "I thought I'd really screwed up, and lost my own kid. Ray, too."

"You did screw up," reminded Peter gently. "Big time. But I'm here, and I'm fine. And so is Ray." He squeezed his father's shoulders, and slowly the elder Venkman let go. He turned around without saying goodbye, walking slowly back down the street with his head down.

"Is he going to be okay? Should be get a cab for him?" asked Ray.

Peter waved him off. "No, he'll be fine. He can get his own cab. Besides, knowing him, he left something incriminating of his own out here, and he wants to see if he can get it back before the cops confiscate everything in the house, if they haven't already."

Ray looked troubled. "Now I feel bad for playing it all up earlier."

"Don't, for a minute. He deserved every second of our impromptu drama festival. Besides, we have someone here who deserves our sympathy a lot more." Peter nudged the blinking trap with his foot.

Nodding, Ray triggered the trap. Carlos's transparent image resolved out of the cone of light, eyes glazed. He looked around blankly, until Peter leaned forward and said, in a forceful voice, "Carlos, you're here."

"Here? Where's . . . " The ghost's eyes focused, first on Peter, then on Ray. "The Ghostbusters. What . . . Luz!" The ghost whirled around to face the townhouse, and drifted towards it. He paused, turned back to Peter and Ray, waved, and said "Thanks. I never would have made it back here on my own." With a smile, he drifted through the door.

Peter and Ray glanced at each other, and Ray started winding up the cord on the trap. A scream rang out from inside, followed by several male voices shouting in Spanish. Egon tightened his grip on the PKE meter, and a flicker of worry crossed Winston's brow. Then the house went very quiet. After a long time, the PKE meter stopped chirping, and its antennae went still.

"That's it," reported Egon. "He resolved peacefully."

"Then let's get ourselves home. I need you guys to put me and Ray up on the sofa and bring us pillows and sandwiches. After all, we've been to the Other Side and back today." Peter pressed his hand to his forehead in mock-angst as Ray tucked the now-empty trap back into the equipment rack. As Ray was about to climb back into Ecto, the door of the townhouse opened and a young lady with jet-black hair down to her waist stepped out, holding a tiny infant.

"Ghostbusters? I just . . . I wanted to thank you. I'm Luz, and this is Estelle." The infant opened its eyes and blinked at the streetlights. "I was never sure what had happened. I didn't want to believe Carlos had abandoned us, but . . . " She shook her head. "But you brought him back to me, enough of him to lay him to rest. And for him to meet his daughter." She shifted the baby girl to her shoulder. "We just got home from the hospital three days ago. She came a little early. But Carlos got to see her." Tears sparkled in her dark eyes. "Thank you for bringing him home to me."

"Not a problem, ma'am. Just performing our services." Peter took the hand not wrapped around the infant, and bowed deeply. Ray grinned like a maniac, and Janine made a soft "aww" sound. Even Egon, who was normally perfectly impervious to the appeals of children, smiled. "If it weren't for Carlos's help, it would have taken us a lot longer to figure out what was going on," added Peter. Luz gripped his hand tightly, smiling through her tears, and whispered "I knew he was a good guy, after all. Thank you so much, again. Good night."

The team watched her let herself back into the apartment. The baby on her shoulder made a faint noise and seemed to look in their direction for a moment; then she was back in the warm light of family, and the door closed.

"Well, that was our good deed for the day," announced Winston, starting Ecto back up.

"Heck, we've been chock full of good deeds today," grinned Peter. "One major bust, two peaceful resolutions, we solved three missing persons cases for the cops, and best of all, no major injuries. We're just that good, guys. Winston, get me home before my ego gets too swollen to fit in the car."

"You got it, man." Winston pulled away from the curb, to general approval.

They all noticed the slumped figure standing in front of the drug house with his hands in his pockets. Winston slowed down for a moment, but Charlie waved them on, and they let him.

\---

Peter propped his feet up on his desk and leaned back. There were no busts scheduled until late afternoon, and he'd found himself awake disgustingly early.

It had been a rougher night than he'd expected. Egon had wanted him and Ray to record everything about their experience inside the phantasm before they fell asleep, which they'd both agreed to do - Ray enthusiastically, Peter with mostly-feigned reluctance. It had taken longer than Peter had expected, especially when he and Ray had related their different perceptions of the 'space' inside the Class Six. Egon had been fascinated by how much their different modalities had changed how they experienced the phantasm's interior, and had asked a long series of questions about the geometry of the place that Peter had some trouble answering.

Slimer had arrived in the middle of the conversation, and Ray had tried to give him the short version of what had happened. Peter wasn't sure Slimer had understood much of it, but he had made one contribution; he had insisted that Peter and Ray must have been "inside bad ghost," rather than just experiencing the inside of the trap. "Trap smaaaaaww. Bawrewy turn awround," Slimer had described. "White wight wright, thouwgh." Ray had to translate that last part for Egon.

Then, when they'd finally all gotten to sleep, they'd taken turns being jolted awake by nightmares. First, Peter had relived Ray's gradual transformation into a ghostly form, culminating in his fading away entirely. He hoped he'd managed not to wake any of the others up, although he suspected Egon had noticed. Then Ray bolted upright, having seen himself being coerced by his fascination with the entity into striking his friends down. They'd all sat on Ray's bed for a while, talking him down from that one. A few hours later, Egon awoke with a sob, believing himself still in the hospital, unable to reunite his friends' captured spirits with their unresponsive bodies. Finally, just before dawn, Winston rolled out of bed with the images of the three mummified corpses in his eyes, rising and stumbling towards him.

"Man, are we messed up tonight, or what?" Winston had asked, on realizing what had happened. He was sheepish - zombies should be old hat for a Ghostbuster, after all - but Peter knew that Winston had the most experience of all of them with the physical, as opposed to ectoplasmic, remains of the dead, and he was a bit shaken up about the bodies, himself. That they'd been so unexpected probably hadn't made it any easier.

They were all out of bed, awake, and aware by daybreak - despite being exhausted from being up and down all night, none of them could get back to sleep. Egon had volunteered to make French toast, which suited Peter fine - Egon wasn't a great cook, but he could follow a recipe, and since Winston had claimed the first shower, the other options had been Peter making scrambled eggs, which was more work than he felt like doing, or Ray doing breakfast, which would have meant cold cereal. They'd eaten mostly in silence in front of the television. An anonymous tipster had resulted in several members of an international drug ring being arrested overnight; the news cameras showed a man being led away from an expensive-looking hotel in handcuffs, and then several police officers being interviewed.

"Hey, isn't that Officer Golan?" Winston pointed at the screen; the muscular cop with mostly-grey hair was describing the extent of the drug ring's activities. The blonde police officer from the previous night was standing in the background of the shot.

"Maybe they wormed some actual information out of ol' Dad," mused Peter. He wasn't sure if he believed it; it would be just as logical for someone from the neighborhood to have tipped off the cops when they searched the townhouses.

Now, he was pretending to do paperwork while Winston made sure the packs were fully charged, and Egon and Ray worked on something in the downstairs workshop. The door creaked as Janine let herself in, and then looked at Peter in mock startlement. "Dr. V, you'd better go back to the hospital right away. Something must be seriously wrong for you to be up before noon when you have an excuse not to be."

He shrugged. "Couldn't sleep. Too many memories of That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know." He raised a hand to his brow and tried to look pathetic. Janine snorted at him and sat down at her desk to change from her walking shoes to heels for her workday. He was gratified to see her look soften for just a second, out of the corner of his eye.

"What I don't understand," Ray's voice explained as it drifted up the stairs, "is what happened to the first person the ghost affected, the one who wasn't tied up in there. He didn't even leave a body. Good morning, Janine!" he called out as he and Egon reached the first floor.

"Morning, Ray." Janine looked a little more openly relieved to see Ray up and about. She'd been very upset when Peter first described Ray's going translucent on him the night before, and had found several excuses to pat Ray's shoulder or squeeze his hand to reassure herself that he was solid.

"We may never know for sure. But remember, when the Class Six first came into full manifestation, it gathered together all the dust in the enclosed space. Carlos described the fourth body as disintegrating, didn't he?" asked Egon.

"He wasn't really clear about it, but yeah, sort of," Ray mused. "He also mentioned that it was sort of bleeding light at one point."

Egon nodded. "I would theorize that person was either possessed by the Class Six, or possibly not a human in the first place - just the Class Six imitating a human form. We have no significant data on the interaction between psychoactive drugs and possession, nor do we know what would happen if a ghost with a physical manifestation attempted to use psychoactives. I suspect the interaction was - unpredictable, and resulted in the form we encountered. That the three spirits it immediately fed on were also under the influence, at least two of them unwillingly, might have destabilized it even more. You'll have noticed that it was not particularly difficult to capture or restrain; it mostly seemed interested in feeding further." Janine shuddered a little.

"Well, we're all safe now, and that's what matters," declared Winston, finishing with the last proton pack and joining the others by Janine's desk. He glanced up at Egon, and said in a slightly softer voice, "You got your two out of five back."

Egon's eyes flashed with a hint of the electricity that he'd loosed on Peter's father. He removed his glasses and rubbed them briefly on his shirt; when he replaced them, the lightning was replaced by warmth, and perhaps a hint of embarrassment. "I did, thanks to two more of them." One of his hands fell to Winston's shoulder, and the other briefly clasped Janine's hand. She looked up and smiled, not quite following the conversation but glad for the contact from Egon.

"So who's number five?"

"My mother. Who else?"

Winston opened his mouth as if he were about to ask something else when the phone rang. Janine plucked it from the desk and answered "Ghostbusters. We'll duke it out with any spook! Oh, it's you." She scowled. "Let me give you to - what? You what?" Her cheeks reddened. "Listen, buster, you can't - don't call me honey, you scuzzball - you can talk to him yourself . . . No, I'll hand you over to - What? No, don't you hang up on me, you - arrrgh!" She slammed the receiver down with force.

"Let me guess. Only the patented Venkman charm could make you pop your top like that, and since I'm right here . . . " offered Peter.

"You got it, Dr. V. That was your old man. He wanted to let you know that he's fine, but he's going on 'an extended business opportunity' out of town, and not to worry about trying to get in touch with him until the heat blows over." Janine sighed exasperatedly. "He's cutting and running again."

Peter tried not to look too disappointed. "That's what he does. He sure stuck his foot in it this time, though. Drug lords outrank con men by several classes. Running might actually be the smart thing to do this time." He ran a hand through his hair. "I can't believe he got mixed up in something that serious. He's taking stupid risks in his old age."

"You can't protect him, Peter," said Egon, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. "One of these days, he will suffer the full consequences of his actions. You'll have to be prepared for it, somehow."

"And he's got a lot of karma coming his way, I know. I keep hoping he'll retire, go straight, something, before he gets himself shot, or worse." Peter moved his fingers to the hand on his shoulder. He had gotten from Winston that Egon had seriously blown his stack at Charlie, and he wanted to hear the story from Egon directly. Not that he blamed him; if Ray had died from their previous day's encounter, he'd have been tempted to neutronize his dad himself, and Egon thought he'd lost both of them. If nothing else, Egon probably needed to get it off his chest. He gripped Egon's hand, then let go, and Egon squeezed his shoulder again before moving off in the direction of the stairs.

Ten minutes later, a bloodcurdling howl from Peter's office brought the other four hurtling to his side. "Peter, what is it, what's wrong?" blurted Ray, leaping from the firepole and racing to the big wooden desk.

Peter's hands were curled into fists. "I am the son of a son of a bitch."

Egon and Winston exchanged glances. "What happened now?"

Peter let out a long breath. "He skipped town without paying us for the job."

There was a long silence, then they all laughed. "Beats crying about it, I guess," wheezed Peter, wiping his eyes.

"Don't worry, we'll let Janine take it out of his hide the next time he shows up," smiled Ray. Janine grinned evilly, and proceeded to describe in painful detail precisely how Charlie Venkman would suffer her wrath. Egon tossed in a couple of choice comments, and Peter was suddenly flushed with warmth as he realized how far his friends - even Janine, whom he teased mercilessly sometimes - would go to protect him. And if Charlie wasn't careful, the combined wrath of Melnitz and Spengler would be terrible to behold. Not that he, Winston, or even Ray were any slouches in the wrath department, either.

Ray's hand was on his back, solid, warm, and quite opaque, and Egon's eyes flashed more with mirth than anger. And Charlie was running from yet another scam with this tail between his legs, down but not out, and not in jail. All was right with the world.

The phone rang a second time. "Ghostbusters. You got a haunt that you don't want?" A few minutes of conversation later, the alarm rang out, and Charlie was forgotten in the excitement of a new day's busting.


End file.
